Why Sports Graphics Matter In An Age Of Stats And High-Tech

The role of sport in broadcasting is almost as old as moving pictures themselves. Archive footage exists of football matches as far back as 1897, in the days when such images could only be seen at cinemas, sound was still years away, and the footage was all in black and white.

Change has been gradual - until recently, but much did change over the years. The Pathe Newsreels of the past added more quality and sound, with additional cameras to provide new angles. Sport itself responded, with innovations like numbering on football shirts (first used in England in the 1933 FA Cup final) aiding identification.

Colour TV and high definition pictures have improved the images, but a second development to complement the sound and commentary has been the use of graphics. This initially provided basic information, such as the score and team line-ups, often with basic lettering appearing on the screen.

Accelerating The Use Of New Technology

At the time, this represented cutting-edge technology. Even as colour came along, this plain lettering format remained. But change was on the way as better technology emerged.

Notable innovations included the use of more extensive graphics from the 1970s, with those at the forefront including commercial TV production firms like Channel 9 in Australia.

Under Kerry Packer, this company, which controversially used its financial heft to create its own rebel World Series Cricket tournaments after failing to secure broadcasting rights for Australia’s games, introduced a range of new features. The sight of a cartoon duck called Daddles accompanying a batsman who had been out for 0 became a common sight.

These graphics, alongside other innovations like coloured clothing, floodlit cricket and white balls for day-night games, all showed the way forward. Having the score displayed constantly in a corner of the screen was another new element.

How Graphics And Stats Change Sports

Innovations like this represented a step forward, but in more recent times, the potential provided by TV and associated technology and graphics, including the use of additional cameras, sensory technology and AI, have all taken matters to a new level, to the point at which they are often impacting on the sports themselves.

Part of this relates to the fact that many sports are increasingly stat-heavy. It is not enough to just keep the score or say who is leading the race. Instead, televised analysis enables the creation of new metrics, such as possession in football, as well as the more nebulous expected goals. Some of it is more scientific, such as telemetry data in motorsport.

All this requires more graphics and the proliferation of these means that sport production, especially but not just live, requires two editors, one for the footage and one for graphics.

Not only does this tell viewers more about what is happening, but it provides data used by support staff to improve the performances of teams, individuals and mechanics.

This is one of the reasons there are great limits to what small, independent productions with limited resources can do against those with the resources to produce and present large volumes of stats in graphic form.

Why You Need Extensive Resources And High Tech

A prime instance of highly-resourced production teams being able to impact sport itself and potentially enhance it is the use of technology in making decisions.

In the past, this was limited to things like photo finishes in races, but now it includes everything from microchips in footballs to show if it has crossed the goal-line to Hawkeye for crucial line decisions, showing if a tennis shot was in, tracking lbw decisions in cricket or judging offsides in football.  

With this comes plenty of graphics, from the exciting virtual reality image of a football or tennis ball landing on either side of the line to the projected ball tracking of a cricket ball.

A further innovation has come with football’s video assistant referee (VAR) system, which has already seen lines drawn on a screen to indicate if a player is offside or not, but now uses semi-automatic offices with virtual reality and AI images, speeding up decisions. These, like Hawkeye, require high technology using AI interpretation of multiple camera angles.

The same technology that improves decision making can also produce more statistics as it tracks data such as the speed a ball is bowled or served, how far a player has run in a game and a plethora of other statistics that cannot be established just by observing the game on screen or with the naked eye.

It is these two combined developments, of increased resources for gathering and interpreting an ever-growing array of data, along with improved graphics to make it look attractive to viewers, that make TV production in the area of sport something that can only be done with extensive resources.