Teamworks acquires Zelus Analytics
With the acquisition, Teamworks adds more than 70 sports data scientists and engineers to its global employee base
Written by Training Ground Guru — September 5, 2024
US sports software company Teamworks has acquired Zelus Analytics, the sports intelligence platform co-founded by Doug Fearing and Luke Bornn in 2019.
Teamworks was founded in North Carolina in 2014 and is the operating system for high performance, powering more than 6,000 sports, military, and public safety organisations worldwide. The company its global expansion and now has employees in 11 countries.
With the acquisition of Zelus, Teamworks adds more than 70 sports data scientists and engineers to its global employee base.
Fearing said: “What’s made us successful is our ability to deliver value to teams across seven sports and at different stages of their analytics journeys. By joining forces with Teamworks, we can bring our world-class analytics platform to more sports and more markets, including collegiate athletic departments eager for a way to value players using on-field performance data.”
Zach Maurides, founder and CEO of Teamworks, added: “Whether it’s deciding who to recruit, transfer, start, or develop - teams effectively using all the data at their disposal have a clear competitive advantage. It was critical for us to find the best in the business and bring that to our customers. It didn’t take us long to realize Zelus was that company.”
Zelus’s client base includes R&D and analytics teams in the MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, IPL, the top five European football leagues and pro golfers on the PGA TOUR. The company’s approach attracted lead investment from RedBird Capital Partners, as well as co-investment from sports analytics pioneer Billy Beane and Kevin Durant's 35V.
Zelus will integrate with Teamworks AMS and Nutrition "to connect off-field preparation with on-field outcomes to drive future performance" and with Teamworks Recruiting to "drive data-backed player evaluations and inform athlete earnings decisions."
Zelus co-founder Bornn, the former Director of Analytics for Roma and the Sacramento Kings, was our guest on Episode #30 of the TGG Podcast in 2021 (which you can listen to below).
He explained: “The whole premise of Zelus is that even with 10 people on staff, teams don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the raw tracking data and do the full-fledged player valuation you would want to do with this kind of data.
“Because there are always demands on their time, from pre-game reporting, ad hoc requests etc, even the really big groups in baseball don’t necessarily have the right combinations of staff to deal with this tracking data and do it in the right way. When we think about building these types of models in basketball, our estimation of the amount of work is 30 person years.
“What football club can devote 30-person years to a statistical modelling task? The answer is obviously none. My focus tends to be aligned in two ways. One is on the technical side - how do we get the best valuation on athletes and on winning? How do we fuse data with machine learning and statistical models that turn it into actionable intelligence and value and how do we combine that with other sources of information like intel and contract information to get the best possible valuation for players?
“The second thing is how do we build an organisation that makes consistently high-quality, good process-driven decisions and decisions that are ultimately going to lead to success? You’re always flipping the coin and trying to bias that coin a little bit to make slightly better decisions every time. If you do that repeatedly, those slightly better decisions add up into long-term sustainable advantage.”
Teamworks is the Headline Sponsor of TGG Live 2024 at St George's Park. Zelus Data Scientist John-Mark Sisman will be appearing on the Data Science Panel at the event, alongside Lee Mooney and Vignesh Jayanth.
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