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Data Visualization in Sports Science - Power BI Tutorial

This video features a deep dive into how sports scientists and coaches can leverage data analytics and visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau to enhance sports science analysis. It includes two Microsoft Power BI mini tutorials, illustrating how to connect and visualize data from an Excel sheet. Guests Ciaran Deeley and Johannes Marthinussen from Sport Horizon discuss the practical applications of these tools in sports science, including creating effective player dashboards and reports. Sport Horizon offer courses tailor-made for sports professionals aiming to develop data analytics skills. A 15% discount on Sport Horizon courses is offered to Global Performance Insights viewers using the information below. For a 15% discount enter code: JOCLUBB15 PowerBI for Sports Scientists Level 1 ► https://www.sporthorizon.co.uk/a/2147649861/Azim6jMr PowerBI for Sports Scientists Level 2 ► https://www.sporthorizon.co.uk/a/2147795490/Azim6jMr Tableau for Sports Scientists Level 1 ► https://www.sporthorizon.co.uk/a/2147649862/Azim6jMr You can download the example GPS dataset used by Johannes in the video on the Global Performance Insights blog: https://www.globalperformanceinsights.com/post/data-analytics-visualization-in-sports-science-powerbi 🎥 WATCH NEXT Transforming Z-scores to T-scores & STEN Score ► https://youtu.be/16GZ1Ed2uVE?si=Wc9_KegFjlEojK01 How to Combine Internal & External Training Load Monitoring ► https://youtu.be/LAuPyif1Czk?si=jda2OcN1Mertvlua 😊 Found my content useful? Say thanks ► https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joclubb ✅ SUBSCRIBE Subscribe to the channel for more videos ► @globalperformanceinsights Subscribe to the blog for more sports science insights ► https://bit.ly/3BybzHU 👩‍🔬 ABOUT Jo Clubb, founder of Global Performance Insights, is an Applied Sports Scientist, with career experience working in sports science across the English Premier League, NHL, and NFL. Jo is now a Sports Science Consultant and consults with professional teams and sports tech companies around the world on sports science. She discusses sports technology, training load monitoring, athlete testing and training, and sports and exercise science careers. 🛍️ SHOP For more useful resources on this topic, check out the Global Performance Insights Amazon shop ► https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/joclubbsportsci 🔗 CONNECT Website: https://bit.ly/3xgDz05 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/joclubbsportsci 👍DISCLAIMER Links included in this description might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you! Thank you for supporting my channel so I can continue to provide you with free content. 📑 CHAPTERS 00:26 Guest Introductions: Ciaran and Johannes from Sport Horizon 06:05 The Birth of Sport Horizon 13:14 Microsoft Excel vs Power BI vs Tableau in Sports Science 19:49 Getting Started with Power BI 22:24 Demonstration 1: Beginners 29:53 Demonstration 2: Intermediate 37:22 The Future of Sport Horizon and Course Details

Global Performance Insights

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Once you've selected load, it will load a couple of seconds. It will just check the quality of the data, that everything is okay. And there you go. What happened now is that he's connected to this Excel file that you stored locally. And you can now start to play around. So that's how quick you can go from Excel to connect your data in Power BI. Literally a couple of seconds. So I'm joined today by Ciaran and Johannes from Sport Horizon who are going to tell us all about getting into these kinds
of tools and also provide us with a demonstration of how we might use this in sports science and talk a little bit about their course that they provide through Sports Horizon. So have a look below as well because we're going to be sharing some links that get you 15 percent off all of their courses that they have available. So, guys, thank you very much for sharing your time and your expertise. Thanks very much Jo. So I started off as a Gaelic football player in my, my native Ireland. Played with
my county and that was really my big introduction to sport and sports science. Did a degree in sports science in University of Limerick and coached a lot. So my kind of first job was really in as a coach and as a development officer, a mix of sports science and coaching and playing. I then came to London, started a internship in QPR in a football club in West London. A club that actually I've, I support, strangely I support, support in Ireland. My whole family do because my parents lived in She
pherd's Bush back in the 60s and 70s before returning back to Ireland. And then also did a Masters in Strength and Conditioning. So really it was as a sports scientist with QPR over the last decade or more really. I had a little bit of a sabbatical over in India working in the Indian Super League with Curla Blasters under Peter Taylor and Terry Phelan, which was a brilliant life experience and a challenging professional experience. At all stages, it was more on the sports science rather than the
S& C. I think my work with QPR and at different times then, as I mentioned, as regards to coaching, I coached and managed the London Gaelic football team, which participated at national level back in Ireland. So that kind of gave me a nice, holistic view of performance. So it wasn't just sports science, it wasn't just coaching, it wasn't just data. It gave me a nice view. And then in the latter years with QPR, I thought, you know what, there's something that I need extra, you know, we were gat
hering all this GPS data, and it's like, okay, what are we actually getting meaningful insights and impacts of this data? In the intervening years then I started a PhD in collaboration with Northumbria University and Queen's Park Rangers on neuromuscular alteration and impairment as a result of youth training. Thankfully, I submitted that in a couple of weeks ago, so I'm just waiting for the viva on that. Johannes, I'll Hop over to you before we speak about the kind of Sport Horizon and specific
stuff. Thanks, Ciaran. And obviously thanks, Jo, for inviting us. We absolutely love the data and where this space is heading. I haven't always been in this space in comparison to Ciaran playing Gaelic football. I played real football, I would say. But I wasn't really good in this real football. So I thought, you know what, if I can't play it. Maybe I can study it. Started studying like sports science. And as many people probably recognize with Norway, it's a winter country. So we are very good
in endurance sport, so I thought, but if I'm going to work in football, I need to go somewhere else. So I went to England to take a Bachelor's in Science and Football at John Moores. Started to get into the clubs, like the link between John Moores and the clubs are very, very good. I always had like the physiology, the biology interest in the very beginning. So I did my, I did sports biology. I did the science behind it, the performance. I did later a master's in strength and conditioning. So I
always had that interest in physiology and, and was working for a fitness coach or strength and conditioning or whatever you want to title it for a number of years in, in England. And also later in golf and in Aspire Academy when I was there. As I sort of went through that journey of these different roles and working on the pitch and being with the team, there was always this. this interest in the data side of things, and that interest sort of just increased and was kind of in parallel with thi
s increase in amount of data as well, because when I was in these early internships, I thought, oh, but a lot of my job was to collect all this data, but where is it really going? What are people doing with all this data, which was like a question I didn't really felt was really answered, like the amount of collected data versus the amount of data being applied , I felt there was a mismatch in those early days, and that really got me interested in, in this space of Tableau and Power BI as potent
ial solutions to be able to communicate and take advantage of all that data collected. So in the last five, six years, it's been mainly data, obviously in parallel with other things, but now it's all data not being on the pitch anymore. And that's where we sort of also came over into the Sport Horizon side of things that, okay, there's definitely a space or some gaps here that we. Potentially can help, help people with. So now it's, it's all data, my passion, so absolutely love it. Thank you bot
h. I think the reason I wanted to chat with you is in part because you're both coming from very practical backgrounds, playing, coaching, sports science, and I think there is this interesting, kind of debate, I suppose, around do you bring in data scientists who have those real specialized skillset? Or do sport scientists try and develop these skills? And I think you two are really great demonstrations of that, of upskilling in the areas of data analytics and visualization. So, that brings us to
Sport Horizon. How did you two first get connected, and then how did it turn into what we see and are going to chat about today in Sport Horizon? A couple of moments kind of helped me along the journey to kind of meet Johannes, and come up with the concept of Sports Horizon. The first one was going back a few years, where I was pulled in from the office into a retain and release meeting of an under 18 player by the academy director and head of coaching and head coaches and head the question was
, how has this player performed over the season? So I started like frantically pulling out GPS reports and, charts from this game and that game. And I just, I came out of the meeting feeling that Maybe I did that player a disservice. I don't know exactly. That player was subsequently released. I'm sure it's not off the basis of what I presented, but I just felt that it needed to be more comprehensive. It needed to be, like, to be able to drag data in, longitudinal data from across the season, or
multiple seasons, and to present them with, okay, here's some real performance data that can actually give some insights into the performance and the development of the player. And that was the kind of moment for me where I went, OK, Excel is not cutting it here. You know, these kind of individual charts and it's a little bit messy. And, if there's a row out of place or whatever, it's difficult to change them and edit it going back over time. But that was the first moment where I thought, OK, w
e really, really need Power BI. The second moment then where I was with the QPRB team up in Manchester and we were about to play Man United the next day and it was kind of a eureka moment for me where I was doing up the weekly reports still in Excel at that point, even though we had kind of made moves to transfer over a transition to Power BI and I spoke to a good friend of mine, Shane Malone in Ireland, who's worked with the GAA, Irish Rugby, amongst other teams and his lecture as well. And he
on the quiet showed me some of his dashboards and reports. And I was, I was just blown away. I just thought, wow, this is, it just visually looks so beautiful. The insights gained, the multitude of players across days, across weeks, across different variables and metrics. And I thought, okay, this is what we need to do. So I used my parental leave and over off season to build out those first dashboards and reports and we used that then for the next probably year and a half in QPR. And then I me
t Johannes on a world soccer Congress in Coimbra in Portugal, where I was presenting a poster and Johannes was just freeloading there, having a good time and we just started his talk and he, he looked at my reports and he said, Okay, yeah, they're good, level, and he showed me some of his ones, it was another level, another step up there, kind of advanced Power BI and Tableau, and it was probably at that point where, linking back to your point, Jo, where yeah we felt that coming from practitione
rs, OK, you can have the data scientists who they might help with the overall structure, the club structure of the data channels and everything like that. But really, you need people who have practical experience and knowledge from the grass to the insights to be able to communicate with the players and the coaches. And that's where we felt that really there was a space there missing, that there was a lot of practitioners around the world who wanted to utilize Power BI and Tableau. But when you
start looking online, there are YouTube videos from financial women and men who are showing how to use Power BI in Tableau, or, you know, there's a lot of different business orientated people who are showing how to do things, but there wasn't really anybody in the sport or the sports science sphere. So I guess that was the point at which we said, okay, maybe we can start building something ourselves and using it ourselves. just want to add to that. I felt another thing that is important to ment
ion is that I have, I completely understand that the roles that people have in the clubs is extremely hectic. Like, the day to day activities in the clubs are full speed, like, you barely have time to eat your lunch before the day is over, there's a new game, there's a pressure you need to deliver and everything. And for you then to spend 10 hours on a YouTube video that's extremely general, that is not covering Thank you anything close to what you are requested at and are under pressure to deli
ver. I can understand it's a challenge because it was definitely a challenge for me because I had to sit on YouTube and try to understand how on earth I am going to calculate acute chronic workload ratio. I tried to speak in the forum. I tried to ask, yes, but, and the guys just have no clue. What is this ratio? The specifics of the courses that we traditionally have seen are very general, and it needs some time to sort of translate that into your environment and what you probably are requested
to build. So it was here we really felt, OK, why don't we make the course specific to the needs and the roles that people are in clubs? Because one thing is to use Power BI or Tableau, but another thing is to use Power BI and Tableau in your space with the type of questions you would answer with the type of data that you normally are given. I think that was a space also that we wanted to really try to fill. So if you just had three hours on the weekend, that is actually enough to go from having
nothing to have your first couple of reports that you can show on Monday morning without having to spend all the weekend watching something that might give you an idea where to start. The nice thing actually as well is that on the courses that we provide, it really does go from like how to connect through SharePoint, through OneDrive, through Dropbox. And like we say that, okay, this is what we think is the optimal, this is the best way of doing it. But we understand that in a lot of clubs. They
're still using Dropbox, you know, they might even be using localized laptops for their data. And each kind of module is both a team and a report or dashboard. So like at the end of each module you can produce this really nice report, but also it covers a team. I think that's why I think this is so appealing and why I wanted to share it really is because you guys are adding that context, that relevance to when people are learning, they are going to be learning with the actual kinds of data, the
kinds of questions that they're dealing with, which is going to be so much more meaningful and useful than doing, analysis on flower datasets or weather datasets. It's really meaningful to them. We're going to do a bit of a demo as well and talk through how to actually get started, but let's almost start at the very beginning. You've spoken about how ultimately in sports science we kind of max out Excel, right? And this doesn't necessarily replace Excel. It's still going to be important to, as a
younger practitioner, develop the skill sets in Excel to learn about pivot tables and formulas and that's going to set you up for these next steps that are Power BI and Tableau. So can you guys maybe explain to those who might not be aware what these tools actually are? I think you're absolutely right, Jo. I think you framed it nicely because it's not the fact that we're completely removing Excel. The way I see it is that we've just changed the role of Excel. So in my job before, if we go back
we do everything in Excel. have the data there, we collect it, we input it, we transform it, we wrangle it, we display it, we share it, like we do everything in Excel. Now I feel like Excel has changed that role and we sort of divided it into Excel being where I personally, speaking from my experience, where I store the data, not always, but a lot of people are storing the data in Excel and then using Power BI or Power BI. Tableau, these tools to communicate their insights, to, to share their da
ta, to display insights to the coaches and do the analysis there. That's effectively what these tools are. These are business analytics tool where you can communicate, if we put it very, very simply, communicate your insights and your data and your analytics. I don't want that people should completely go away from Excel. I think there are some very useful things in Excel and we need to be aware that also a lot of the companies that are collecting data all of them export to Excel. Obviously now y
ou have a lot of the a lot more have the possibility to connect to an API. That's a slightly different thing that requires more skills in Python and R and these type of languages. So if you still just are at the other side of the journey, to store it in Excel is a very convenient and simple solution. But what I found when I tried to have this all in one solution in Excel, and the reason why I sort of shifted over was, It's multifactorial. I, I remember I was trying to create an Excel document fo
r maybe five, six years ago to all the clubs in Norwegian football. So we're speaking top division clubs, so 30, 40 clubs. I needed to create an Excel file where I could input the player data to show the game cycles of the players. And I thought, okay, perfect. No, no issue at all. I've done quite a bit of Excel, you know, you have some VBA coding, you can add some function when you press here, this happen and really maximize, like a really maximized Excel. And then I was going to share all this
with everyone and one guy's reply, ah, sorry, but I have Mac. This function isn't working on Mac. Okay. No problem. And then next, I pressed the wrong button. I deleted all the functions are, and then it just came rolling in. So that was one of the reasons and lead me over to why I sort of shifted over. I feel like the possibility to collaborate across the organization, because it is a Microsoft solution, you can put it in Teams. I recently did a presentation where I integrated Power BI into Po
werPoint, so I was having an interactive presentation with someone else, but can I have a look at my club? and in PowerPoint, because it's a Microsoft solution, you select the club, you change the filter and boom, your club arrived live in PowerPoint. You don't need to go anywhere, so I feel like because it's a Microsoft solution, especially with Power BI, it's easy to integrate. Now with the AI features, there's a lot of AI features coming into Power BI, and I guess the big one for me was just
the ease of use. Like it's very quick to go from having just Excel and I will show in the demo later on how quickly you can go from having A raw data file in Excel to have your first chart where you can do a lot of different things. Just to take a step back as well from an applied practitioners point of view, we're gathering so much data from different sources, GPS and VALD and performance data and maturation data. Um, and your ultimate job is to become more efficient, to quicken the process, an
d then to gain more insights and communicate that to the coach and to the players. Like, that's a very kind of simple journey of that. And the use of Power BI and the use of Tableau will drastically quicken that process. So, from our point of view, we're saying to practitioners, then, that Look, you don't need to spend two hours on dropping in the data, filtering it, creating the tables, the charts, creating the reports, that you can actually make that process so more efficient, so that you can
have your report, your dashboard created in, you know, a matter of minutes, in a really good case, and then you can spend your time on going into the gym and making sure that players, you're engaging with the players more, or spending more time speaking with the coaches, or planning individual programs, or talking about the next day's session. So it's really making the process more efficient. And then sometimes, it's quite a trendy throwaway remark to say that, oh, it doesn't matter how It's how
good your report looks. It's how you communicate that with the coaches and the players. And in part that's true. In some ways it's not about making it look amazingly fancy and everything like that. But, and There's a lot of science behind your communication strategies and colors and how the data is displayed and so you don't have to make it look amazingly fancy but again you want to make it look nice and engaging and gain insight so that the coach can kind of say oh yeah actually that that's qu
ite an important point there isn't it . So what I'm hearing then essentially is efficiency and effectiveness, right, which is what as sports scientists we're all striving for. Hopefully we save some time and make our own workflows as efficient as possible as well as for those around us. But then making sure that, that, that data, the reports, the communication is as effective as possible. Okay, so now then, getting started. As I said, we had everything stored in Excel. We had all the charts, the
tables. It was quite an inefficient process. At the beginning, we were still Housing all our data on, on Dropbox, on Excel, exporting across to Power BI. We had built our charts, our tables there. Johannes will show in a second, maybe that that is definitely not the the most efficient way. So I suppose for somebody who's trying to self learn like that in the way that that I did over a number of years is definitely not the best way or the most efficient way. If I had engaged with the courses tha
t we're doing I probably would've cut out about 18 months of learning, I suppose. Hmm. But I didn't have anybody to kinda show me, okay, this is the gold standard, this is the, the best way, let's say. But I suppose that's how we've tried to kind of be much more efficient and provide users and practitioners with like here. The best steps are the quickest steps to get you from 0 to 10 on Power BI or Tableau. Personally the way I learned was little just. Download, open, and try. I literally just w
ent home. I got a student license. I opened the, the the software. I connected to some data and I just thought, okay, what happens if I do this? And I literally just tried. And that is, I think that's still important. People definitely just need to dig in and play around and see what you can do. But I think it's also important to at least be familiar and understand the basics. Because if you, if you don't get the basics, right, you will come to sort of one level where you're sort of a bit stuck
because you don't understand the basics, which doesn't allow you to sort of go to that next level. So I'm a bit of understand the basics, get them, get to know them well, but also just keep playing around, like in parallel, there is always like this continued development, things are changing. So if I'm just in Excel and I'm thinking, should I get started? I just want to show you how quickly you can get up and running. So I believe, Jo, you will, you will share this document with the people. So i
f you want to try, Jo will share with you that, that Excel document file. So there's literally no excuse. You only need to download the document, download the software, if you don't already have it, and then just follow these steps. And you can build a session report in just a matter of. And I just want to be clear, like, obviously we cannot cover everything, but this is just how you can get started to play around, to try and fail and actually build something. So I would just share my screen her
e. So I would now just assume that you have downloaded. the software, and you also downloaded the Excel file that Jo will provide you. So this is some data that's collected from a GPS unit. So there is some GPS data for a team for a couple of months. So when you've downloaded the software, it will just come in here. So this is how it looks. You will then Simply, we'll go straight ahead, no fussing around, we'll just go and get the data straight away. And then I will explain in more detail. So wh
en you come on here, make sure you are in the Home tab here, and you select Excel. Just browse to the folder that you have, so I have stored the data and the file. Select the file, and you select Open. This will then load a little bit. And it will ask you which sheet in the document would you like to connect to, because you might have different tabs or sheets in Excel. We only have one, so we'll just grab this one, and we'll select load. Once loaded, If you selected load, it will load a couple o
f seconds. It will just check the quality of the data, that everything is okay. And there you go. What happened now is that he's connected to this Excel file that you stored locally. And you can now start to play around. So that's how quick you can go from Excel to connect your data in Power BI. Literally a couple of seconds. What we will have then is that a data pane. This is where you can see your table. So we just selected sheet one. If you press the arrow, you can see all the columns we have
in our data. For you to just understand what we're speaking about here, I'll just come to the view on the left here, which is called the table view. Currently, we are in report view, where we build the report. We have another one that's called table. This is where you just can have a different look on the data we just connected to. So this is. Very similar to what we see in Excel, we have a tabular format, meaning we have some columns, and we have some rows of data. You can scroll down, you can
find a column you would like, and you can play around a little bit. If you want to filter some data, you can do here, and say I would like only a given day. You can select that and you will get that data. It's important to notice that this will not change the data set. This is done in a different place that I will explain later on, but this is how quickly you can play around and see a little bit of your data. So normally you would come here if you're unsure about what you've done for a given ca
lculation. You can come here, filter the data, and you can see, ah, okay, that is correct, or no, that was not correct. So we've seen how to connect. We've seen how we can have a look at what data we have on the right in a table and the columns. We then have what's called a visualization pane, and this is the beauty of Power BI because you have a lot, a lot of different ways you can communicate and display your data. And there's also a community building a lot of visuals, which is really, really
cool. Get more visuals will give you a host of different alternatives if there is something specific that is not already here that you can add. But if we are just keen on creating a session report, and you can do a session report in many ways, but here is one how we can do it in three clicks. Select stacked bar chart, you pull it out here, and then it's saying and giving you options what you can fill in. We would like maybe our player name. That's always nice to see who did what. We can put tha
t on the y axis, and you can take the traditional total distance that we love, as an example, and we pull that on the y axis, and there you go. Literally, in three clicks, you can create A visual. There is a lot of things you can do with these visuals, and I encourage you to just play around here. What happens when I select this one? What is this? What does it mean? Okay, it means that. Just play around a little bit. This is only to get you started. How do you come in here? If you want to duplic
ate this, CTRL C and CTRL V, and you can change the metric, and we have another one. So that's how easy you can create a chart. You can modify the chart. Different types, move it around, and there you go. The last thing I want to show you, in order to get started, now we're taking all the data, but you might want to have a look at just a given session, and that's nice to know. Well, we have another one called Slicer. We can pull in the Slicer, and he's then asking, can you please give me a field
that I can slice the data with? Let's say we take the date. So we pull in the session date. And if I now just drag this one, you can see the data is changing automatically. And it's applied to both, so it's super easy now to start filtering your data. Maybe you want to change this a little bit, and you want to have a dropdown instead, so you can select one date. And there you go. You can select the given date that you want. You can do the same to add more filters if you want players or any othe
r things. You can modify colors. So that's essentially how you connect to data. Select Excel, add a chart, pull in what you would like the chart to display. And you have built your first session report. You can, of course, add the background colors, add some titles and everything. But in order just to get a feel for, without being afraid of anything, because it's very quick to get started, you have now the file, you've got the link to download, and I just encourage you to play around with this,
and obviously if there's any questions, we are more than happy to help out, and that's how to get started very, very quickly. It looks a lot less scary and it looks a lot more just like Excel. So again, reiterating the importance of those initial skill sets in Excel that then transfers over to these kinds of tools as well. If you are familiar with Excel before, you would find the sort of change over much more convenient. At least I found because they're still in the Microsoft solution. So Micros
oft understand, OK, the logic there, it's probably nice to apply, so it's not completely new. So you're definitely right. There is a lot of similarities. Yeah, the other thing I was going to, an additional point I was going to mention, we, we, we won't cover it today, but it's, it's in the courses, is that you can do a lot of the manipulation of the data and the analysis in Power BI, so you can set up structures within, let's say, the backend of Power BI before it's visualized. And the beauty ab
out that is that It can take out the chance of error. You can just drop in your CSV files or your Excel booklet or whatever and even if there are little errors in that, if you've manipulated that data in a correct manner and set up rules and everything like that, it just takes out that chance. So I think you've shown here then the clear benefit of experimenting, which you've both spoken about, but clearly anytime we're trying to learn, then some structured learning is a benefit as well. And as y
ou guys said, I think the unique approach that Sport Horizon and your courses are bringing is that relevance, that context. So I wondered if you wanted to maybe show some examples of what kind of example dashboards or reports going through the courses people will learn to create. Definitely. So I guess for the level one course that we have, we cover a lot of these basics, how to get connected, how to modify your data, how to build the different visualizations. So you really upskill on and gettin
g confident in using this software. Then we understand there are a lot of people who are sort of at that level already, that maybe are already in Power BI, who are confident with playing around a little bit, but what I've found is that sometimes you hit a little bit of a plateau at that stage, because you maybe haven't done some of the fundamentals at a high enough level, and I think, and I think it would be useful to share a little bit as well. Some of those things that I've found, if you maste
r these couple of things, you can really sort of take that next bounce and your next step in Power BI. So I can show a little bit of that as well. So if we cover that basics, if we come to sort of a more advanced part of Power BI. The data modeling is maybe one of the skills that I felt people underestimate the value of. A lot of people are trying to learn complex DAX and they try to do different things, but I've felt that If you manage to master the data model, you can really upskill. And this
is something we really try to explain in plain, English. What on earth is a data model? Okay. It's two tables speaking together and you have a model. It's not more complex. Let's just. Let's make it simple for the people. So if we come in here, you can see this is a data model. So that might look a little bit scary at the moment. If we come back and just show the alternative model that we just built, I think that's nice to show. This is the data model we have. It's literally just one table. So w
e see the table, we just input it. And that gives us a table. If we had another table, and we connected them together, we could say, okay, this is our data model. It's two tables speaking together in a given way. And that brings us over to relationships. The way they speak together is what we call a relationship. And you can tell one table to say, I only take data if you have this. Or you can say, ah, we take a little bit from each other. Or the opposite way around. So you have different types o
f ways these can speak together. And if you manage to understand how Power BI like the model to be, because Power BI have one structure and one way it prefer that you build the model. And we call this a star schema. So it should be some tables in the middle with some stars around that you can use for filtering. And when you understand how to do that. You can really reduce the amount of complexity for your DAX calculations. So if you're not confident with DAX, because it's not an easy language, w
e need to be honest, it's not the easy language to learn, to use and write code on. But if you understand the data model, you can reduce the complexity immensely. So what essentially is happening here is that we We've created a player report, a player dashboard, something that some, probably many are looking for, where you have a lot of different tests. It's the same athlete doing the test every single time, but they might do different time points, different tests, and you maybe want to compare
the different tests against each other. What happened last time to this time? So what we create here is just a player table. So we have all the players in here. We have a date. So it's essentially just all the dates. And then we just put the endurance data, we put the sprint data, we put the countermovement data, and we just put that around these two tables. So when I select, if I select Jo here, that you're one of our players, I filter Jo for the endurance, for the sprint, for the countermoveme
nt jump, and I say I only want Jo for the last year. No problem. I go in the date table and I say give me the last year for Jo for these three tables. So I think understanding how you can take advantage of a good data model is really something that I felt been undervalued when people try to do something quick. And I think that's why it's important to explore and do everything, but also have that structured learning. At the same time, so you can understand these basics because that's when you rea
lly can can bounce off so that that will definitely highlight. If you want to explore something when you are in Power BI, explore the data model and also the button called transform data. So this is the power query editor. So, this is essentially where you can create these tables for the player ID, for the comparison between data, and you can do some modifications if you want to create a ratio, or some comparison, or anything. So, explore the data model, relationships, and the query editor. Once
you master those, you are in a really good spot to create visuals like this, where you compare players of your team against all the other teams historically, where you can add filters and, and do a lot of comparison depending on either the generation or position. Maybe you want to compare all the goalkeepers that you have on countermovement jump, or so when Ciaran have that discussion about the player, should he be selected or not, he can say, well, this player, compared to all the players that
we had in this position at his age, with his maturation status, he's actually quite quick. And there is maybe some hidden potential in this player that we need to consider, maybe not making changing the decision, at least you have a more informed decision. One of the questions we get asked a lot as well is should you go with Tableau or Power BI? And I think traditionally Tableau has been viewed as the slightly more advanced software solution and slightly more intuitive. I think marginally looks
better and I think still at this point looks a little bit more cleaner. It's like with Apple, it's like with, with Microsoft, any of these huge multinational companies, when they start putting effort into a solution, like it advances at a crazy rate. And we're probably seeing a little bit of that with Power BI now, like Power BI is a native Microsoft solution and app, and they're putting a lot of effort and the other thing as well that's currently happening is obviously the, uh, all the AI solu
tions, like with the copilot and everything like that with Microsoft. It's just meaning that the advancement in the solution is just going, you know, on an upward trajectory. It's worth mentioning as well, is that I think, Johannes, we would say Power BI is a little bit easier to master at the beginning. Just the functionality of it so going from Excel to Power BI is a little bit easier a step than to Tableau. So it's not like we push people towards Power BI, but I think a lot of people just hav
e Power BI as part of their Microsoft suite of apps in Office 365. Brilliant, so I know you guys are working hard to always add courses as well. At the moment it's Power BI for Sports Scientist Level 1 and Power BI for Sports Scientist Level 2 and Tableau for Sports Scientist Level 1. So what we feel is that as the demand grows, as more people go through the Tableau Level 1, we'll add on a Level 2 then, the next level. But at the moment, and Jo, you're probably seeing it when you're going around
to clubs around the world and interacting with organizations, the hot topic at the moment seems to be Power BI and that's what people are, are looking for. I guess in the near future and the medium term, like we're looking at first of all, Power BI for S& C coaches. So specifically looking at gym loading, maturation based, performance data as well, fitness testing. There's other mini courses that we're looking at as regards like Performance Analysts, because obviously they're gathering so much
data as well and performance and technical data, and it's it's nice to have that they can look at our courses and improve their Power BI and Tableau skills massively, but what about specifically taking some of their data and making it really relevant and specific? The other thing is that we're looking at is a membership model whereby instead of just purchasing a course that you can sign up to membership or like a monthly rolling membership and then every month we upload videos and upload solutio
ns about okay. This is how you do create this report or what are the users and practitioners kind of problems and how can we solve them. And then to create a community of practitioners then where we all learn from each other, which is the kind of the ultimate goal. and also some kind of service consultants as well. So like we are currently already working in some football clubs, whereby they've come to us and said, we want to solve either this little specific issue that we're having with our dat
a analysis and data visualization, or also we're working with a club where they're working with They're saying to us, okay, what we're doing now is great, but we would like to do X, Y, Z. Obviously that's a bigger build that either we can come in and just create it for you and leave you with it, show you how to use and leave you with it, or we build it for you, we maintain it, or a kind of a collaborative agreement whereby we show you how to build this, you create it, but also we're there in the
background to kind of help that process, at all stages. You guys have kindly offered 15 percent off for anyone who's watched this video and is keen then to dive into your courses. So we will put in the description below the relevant links for all the courses you mentioned. And as you said, lots more on the horizon as well. No pun intended. For people who want to know even more about Sport Horizon. as well as you two individually, where is the best place for them to go online? www.Sporthorizon.
co. uk is our website, so sporthorizon. co. uk, and I'm sure that'll be in the notes from Jo. You can email us at info at sporthorizon. co. uk. We've a bag full of free content as well, actually, on the website and people will find that through LinkedIn posts as well. And we just feel that where we can give out a lot of this free content that people can engage with and how to create some really cool and interactive dashboards that Johannas has made from like the Women's World Cup recently in Aus
tralia and New Zealand and you can get an opportunity to play around with your data and kind of have a bit of fun with it. So do have a look at that as well. Best social media way of contacting us is through LinkedIn, definitely. So there is Sport Horizon UK handle on Twitter, or you can find me, Ciarán Dealy, or Johannes Martinhusen on LinkedIn as well. I suppose LinkedIn is kind of our main social media channel for, for this business. We've put up a series of posts over the last year and a lit
tle bit. We've only been in existence, you know, about 14 months, I think. And already just the interest we've had, not just from football and from other sports, but around the world has been incredible. You know, we've had people from Africa, Asia, South America, North America, Europe, obviously UK, plenty Ireland flying flag as well. You know, it's been, it's been great. And the nice thing is like, we just get people just dropping in a direct message on LinkedIn and we can chat there and also
anybody who does our courses signs up to our courses they join a little WhatsApp group as well for Power BI and Tableau. It's quite cool actually, so we will just post some interesting things we find online about Power BI or data analysis or Tableau, but also we've got into the habit now of users have actually posted. First of all, they posted some issues they have with their data and OK, how can I solve this issue and not only we are coming back, but other users are coming back as well. So we'r
e creating that community of practitioners with solutions and probably my personal favorite. Then is some of the users post actually little screen grabs of their dashboards and reports and we can kind of go. Oh, that's really cool. Actually, it looks great and they often ask for feedback and we can give little tips and feedback as well. I would definitely encourage people, one, to go on the Sport Horizon website because you've got some examples on there and of course more information on the cour
ses. And I would certainly encourage people to follow both of you on LinkedIn because I do think that you both post some really interesting content on there as well as tons more examples of the kinds of dashboards as well as your real life kind of stories and experiences with it. Thank you guys very much for your time, for sharing your, your stories, but then also the demonstration and, and hopefully this will help viewers feel perhaps a bit more confident going into this upskilling in these are
as and becoming hopefully more efficient and more effective in their, their data and their sports science processes. So thank you guys, guys both very much. Thank you, Jo. Thanks a lot.

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