Rugby's data revolution – can Moneyball be oval?

Top rugby clubs are increasingly turning to data when they plan their moves to recruit talent. Alex Sanderson and Phil Dowson, directors of rugby at Sale and Northampton respectively, oversee recruitment processes that increasingly lean on data "I've watched more rugby in the last five years than I think I'll ever watch in the rest of my life." And for Angus Campbell, that really is a lot of rugby. On a weekend, Campbell will gather with his Oval Insights colleagues in an office on an industrial park outside Leeds and watch live feeds of games happening simultaneously around the world. It sounds like a sports bar. It is, in fact, hard graft, as they harvest data at scale.

For each match, two people work furiously to categorise the main elements of the action as it unfolds, marking possessions, penalties, set-piece outcomes and open-play kicking. Another four people follow behind, taking passages of play in turn, and enriching that initial information with finer detail. Individual carries, post-contact metres, tackle success, tackle type, tackle dominance, individual ruck entries and ruck duration are just some of the information they are hunting. Shortly after the final whistle, they will have broken each match down into 2,000 individual events. With the various descriptors attached to each, there is a total of about 10,000 pieces of