Sports analytics is one of the leading fields in data science. Most professional sports teams call on the help from professional statisticians to help with their operations, be it in team/individual performance or in business performance.
“Who do you think will win?”, “Why is this team dominant?”, “Who is the best player right now?”, “What is the best strategy in this situation”. There are several reasons why a team would ask these questions and, through data science, these answers could be studied AND visualised.
There is no shortage of data when it comes to sports; there are hundreds of thousands of games and probabably millions of lines of data about basketball, football, baseball, soccer, etc. You could find data about teams, specific players, games, and many other things that you would want to know about a sport.
The best thing about sports analytics (or perhaps data science in general) is that you don’t need to have a job in the field to start doing analysis; data can be found anywhere and tools for analysis are available, you just have to start asking questions.