Smart ball analytics proves value in rugby

How is the discipline of sports analytics evolving to deliver marginal gains to the performance of players and teams?

Rugby football is no stranger to analytics. But what difference does it make at an elite competitive level?

Dan Biggar (pictured above) is a Welsh professional rugby player, primarily known for his role as a fly-half – a position that is known as the creative brain of a rugby team, like the number 10 position in football.

Biggar is currently playing for French Top 14 side Toulon, and has twice been selected to tour with the British and Irish Lions. He earned his first cap for Wales in 2008 and has been a mainstay in the national team, representing his country in Rugby World Cups and Six Nations Championships. With 112 caps, he is the most-capped fly-half for Wales and has scored over 600 points in his career. Over his international career, he has won three Six Nations titles and a Grand Slam with Wales, and was captain for the 2022 Six Nations campaign.

What does Biggar think of the role of analytics in rugby? Compared with, for example, more traditional aspects of team sports, like the culture of a specific group of players at a particular moment in time?

“I’m always really intrigued by the word ‘culture’ because you can’t coach it. As soon as you start coaching culture, it becomes forced, and some people, especially in a team environment, may not agree, or it’s difficult to get,” he said.

Wales bucked the culture of being the underdogs, but we only did that because of the hard work we put in

“And culture is very difficult to measure. How do you measure the All Blacks’ culture against England’s culture, or Wales’s culture, or Scotland’s culture? It’s just something that you create without knowing you’re creating it,” added Biggar.

“The culture of Welsh rugby is always wanting to be, or always thinking of ourselves as, the underdogs. Wanting to punch above your weight. Now, one thing I will say on that is, when we had our most successful years, 2011 to 2021, we bucked every cultural trend of Wales because, during those 10 years, we were not underdogs very often. We weren’t expected to punch above our weight. We were the guys who were the standard bearers in a sense, certainly in the northern hemisphere,” he recalled.

“It’s a fascinating discussion, which probably can’t be measured. But what can be measured is how hard you work, how many metres you’ve run, how many minutes you’ve spent on the training pitch, and so on. If you combine those numbers and put them into, say, a Welsh culture of being hard-working underdogs, that’s where you’d find an overlap between the two.

“So, we bucked the culture of being the underdogs, but we only did that because of the hard work we put in. If you have a hard-working culture with the stats to back it up, you have an overlap. But if the stats say you are way off it compared with other teams, you don’t have a hard-working culture.”

He also says you can hold team members to account with data, and vice versa.

“I used to act on what I felt, and I think that has stood me in good stead in general. But then, when you go back and look at the data, or the video analysis, or whatever, you can think that probably wasn’t the right way to handle this or that situation. Wales had a culture where we could hold each other to account. And if we had a heated disagreement on the field, in the moment, we were brilliant as a group by the time we’d got off the pitch or showered or had dinner together in the hotel afterwards – it was gone,” said Biggar.

“It’s always helpful if you’ve got something to back [your theory] up, whether that’s a video analysis, a stats pack, data analysis, whatever it is”

Dan Biggar, professional rugby player

“We could then look back and say, ‘What do you think here? What do you think the stats say here? If we did it that way, we’d have been better off. Or if we did it the other way, we would have got more success out of it’, you know?

“It’s always helpful if you’ve got something to back it up, whether that’s a video analysis, a stats pack, data analysis, whatever it is. If you’ve got something to make your point more valid, and you do it in the right way, you’re generally going to get a lot more out of your players, employees, workers, whatever.”

On the question of whether data analytics is landing with professional rugby players better than it might have done 10 to 15 years ago, Biggar says 100% yes.

“The game has changed dramatically in the last 25 years, but the game has changed even from five to 10 years ago. And I think nowadays players are very much more wanting to look at certain examples on laptops or get provided with stats and analysis pieces,” he said.

And that is especially true of his position, he says, which is a playmaker position. “[Others can] go through the whole game and just know their role, just know their positions and what they need to do individually. Probably positions like myself, I need to know, ‘What does Dan Biggar need?’ But also, ‘What does the number 12 for Australia do? What does the number 6 for Argentina do? And how often do Ireland lose playing into the wind?’ When you are in a position of real leadership, you probably need to know more about the data and the analytics.”