UPC School and FC Barcelona present new Sports Analytics postgraduate course

The relevance of data in today's society is unquestionable, not only in the business field but also in the world of professional sports. Associations, sporting entities and private companies in the sector produce a large amount of data that, when subjected to an adequate handling and analysis strategy, can be translated into information of high value to the organisation. Analytics has therefore become a constantly growing area that is fundamental to decision-making in the field of sports.

The Sports Analytics postgraduate course will offer a global, transversal vision of the ecosystem of data applied to sport, with a dual vision: Data Management and Data Analytics. It will attempt to provide professionals with the most advanced tools, with the aim of extracting the relevant knowledge for the organisation with a practical vision for strategic decisions. The collaboration with FC Barcelona, through the Barça Innovation Hub, will allow alumni to work with top level data on the resolution of real world problems looking at the application of Sports Analytics at one of the best clubs in the world -a pioneer in football data analysis.

Marta Plana, secretary of the FC Barcelona board and head of the Barça Innovation Hub, says that "with this initiative we put our experience in Sports Analytics in the reach of students, achieving one of the goals of the BIHUB, which is to share knowledge by associating ourselves with prestigious academic institutions and training professionals in different areas of the sports industry."

 Luis Llanes, director of the UPC School, explains that the postgraduate course shows "the elevated impact of synergistic strategies, with two leading institutions: FC Barcelona and the UPC. This link guarantees excellence, quality and applicability for technical content, combined with efficient management."

Once the postgraduate course is concluded, participants will be able to undertake a professional career at football clubs and other sports teams, as well as related private businesses and investigation consultancies.

The programme is run by Alberto Abelló and Òscar Romero, doctors of IT Engineering at the UPC and lecturers in the IT Systems Engineering Department of the university. Both coordinate the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network Data Engineering for Data Science y el Erasmus Mundus Master Big Data Management and Analytics course. They also run the Big Data Management, Technologies and Analytics Masters course at UPC School and Data Science and Big Data Masters at the UPC, and have served asconsultants to SAP, HP, Zurich Seguros and the WHO. Completing the team of academics is Javier Fernández de la Rosa, an IT Engineering graduate, Master of Artificial Intelligence and doctor of Artificial Intelligence at UPC. He currently leads the Sports Analytics team at FC Barcelona.

The UPC School has a proven track record in Big Data. Since 2016-17, the institute has run a course on Big Data Management, Technologies and Analytics. Since November 2019 this has been added to with the postgraduate in Big Data: Generation, Analysis and Data Protection, supported by the Consorci per a la Formació Contínua de Catalunya.