CHENNAI: When Gujarat Titans won the Indian Premier League (IPL) at the first time of asking in 2022, one person came in for special praise. Sandeep Raju, somebody who had played zero games for the franchise. But the role he played helped Hardik Pandya & Co. win the league. “I basically help the team with with performance analytics,” he had said in an in-house video the franchise uploaded. “I help them look at data and come up with performance and strategies and I also help with recruiting talent.”
Of course, none of this is new. All sports teams — franchise, clubs, countries across a wide variety of sport — employ data analysts to give them that extra one per cent. What, though, links Raju with most of the other analysts currently employed by various IPL teams is the city they call home? Chennai (or a place in Tamil Nadu). Mumbai Indians have in their ranks Varun Narasimhan. Rajasthan Royals have Krishnan Seshadrinathan. Sunrisers Hyderabad have Gaurav Sundararaman. Lakshmi Narayanan has been associated with Chennai Super Kings. Shrinivas Chandrasekaran (Lucknow Super Giants) and Sankar Rajagopal (former Punjab Kings, now with Jio) are other names.
Why is this the case? There are multiple reasons but the most common answer is that the ‘companies that provide data analysts are headquartered in Chennai’, both within a 10km radius (SportsMechanics and Kadamba). In a way, this is what’s happening to the IPL teams. Because some teams still do not have separate data wings, what they essentially do is hire employees of these two companies for a fixed period every season. This year alone, there are at least seven Tamil-speaking analysts in IPL.
Big team players
Even the Indian men’s cricket team have on their roster somebody who is associated with Chennai-based company Sports Mechanics (Hari Mohan, who hails from Coimbatore). Seshadrinathan was at StatDNA, Arsenal’s analytics company when Arsene Wenger was the manager.
