SportsBall

A SportsBall x BaAM collab where data vis meets epic sports proportions - in colorful detail.🎨 From building a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield to staging outdoor hockey in the Florida heat, we turn bold sports dreams into reality. These aren’t CGI moments. They’re real events, built from the ground up. 🌽 2,500 dump trucks of material moved in Iowa 🏟️ 6 miles of fencing and 4 million lbs of concrete for the Super Bowl 🧊 Outdoor hockey rinks in Miami & Tampa At BaAM, we blend experience design, operations, and large-scale project management to deliver the nearly impossible. For us, it’s not just what we do—it’s how we do it. 💪 See more at https://bit.ly/4jBE7Dy. #sportsball #datastorytelling #datavisualization #superbowl #winterclassic

SportsBall Business Case Study 📝 The Arena Group just released its 2024 earnings and there’s a fascinating story buried in the numbers. The publicly traded media company owns and operates digital brands across sports, lifestyle, and finance. The focus of this story, though, is Athlon, their sports content arm, which quietly pulled off a major financial turnaround. Here’s how it happened: For most of 2023, Athlon brought in under $1 million per month in programmatic ad revenue. But by December 2024, that number jumped to $3.2 million. The reason? A radical shift in their editorial model. In early 2024, Athlon ramped up content volume from around 1,600 articles per month to sometimes over 15,000 while maintaining steady reader retention. More content led to more pageviews and over 700 million ad impressions in December alone, resulting in a spike in that programmatic ad revenue. To enable this scale, Athlon moved away from salaried writers and introduced a revenue-sharing model. Writers were paid based on the ad revenue their content generated. Editorial oversight stayed in-house, but content creation became performance-based. Costs became variable, but so did output and revenue. The result: Arena Group posted its first-ever profitable quarters in Q3 and Q4, and is now expanding the model across other titles like Men’s Journal, The Street, and Parade. A bold editorial experiment, and for now, it’s paying off. Tagging The Arena Group's CEO Paul Edmondson here to answer any questions people have on the company or strategy. Follow SportsBall for more sports data storytelling #Media #DigitalStrategy #ContentEconomics #AdTech #sportsball

The modern football calendar isn’t slowing down, and Chelsea Football Club’s season proves it: 57 matches. 6 competitions. Just 310 days. In March alone, Chelsea played 4 games in 10 days. 22 players took the field. This kind of fixture congestion is the reality for many elite clubs around the world. And it comes at a cost. In 2023, the average Premier League club lost £13.3 million to injury-related absences. Managing workloads is not just about protecting stars. It is about keeping the entire squad physically ready and mentally sharp. That is why more teams are investing in smarter athlete monitoring systems. With Catapult’s new Vector 8, teams can live track up to 120 athletes across a 400 meter by 400 meter pitch. That means real time decisions, efficient recovery strategies, and data driven rotation plans. Explore how Vector 8 can help clubs like Chelsea stay ready for what is next. https://hubs.ly/Q03hpNwn0 #Vector8 #PlayerAvailability #ElitePerformance #FixtureCongestion #SportsTech #FootballScience #CatapultSports

Pickleball is probably bigger than you think... The SFIA - Sports & Fitness Industry Association just released its latest report on U.S. sports participation, where pickleball was the fastest growing sport again in 2024. In 2019, 3.5 million Americans played pickleball. By 2024, that number reached nearly 20 million. For comparison, tennis, long the largest racquet sport in the U.S., grew 46% over the same period. Pickleball has added 16 million new participants since 2019, the most of any activity in the U.S. and roughly 5% of the entire country. That includes both casual players (those who play a few times per year) and core players (those who play regularly), both groups growing at a similar rate. Two major developments have followed this participation spike: 1️⃣ Infrastructure – The number of pickleball courts in the U.S. increased 50% in 2024 alone. There are now over 70,000 courts nationwide, including large venues with 50+ courts in states like Florida, Arizona, and California. 2️⃣ Professional Leagues – The United Pickleball Association now manages both of the sport’s main leagues: MLP (a coed team-based format) and PPA (a traditional tournament structure), where roughly 150 athletes compete across both properties. Sponsorship revenue for the leagues has grown over 40% annually for two years, and YouTube match viewership is up 32% year-over-year. The 10-event MLP regular season begins April 24 in Orlando and will stream on PickleballTV. Follow SportsBall for more sports data visualizations 📊 #linkedinsports #pickleball #datastorytelling #sportsball

Fifty days ago, Ben Hildred was halfway through one of the most ambitious personal challenges we have ever seen: climbing one million feet on a mountain bike in just 100 days 🚵♂️⛰️ 10,000 vertical feet per day. Every day Today, he has officially completed the ride. This is not Ben’s first time chasing elevation. Since 2018, he has completed yearly rides that mirror the heights of Everest, double Everest, and even Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system. But this challenge was his most demanding by far. One million vertical feet. One hundred days. One rider. The effort was not just physical. It was environmental. He faced highs in the 80s, lows near freezing, and rain on more than a quarter of the days. He started his summer rides at 4AM to beat extreme UV levels, and as the seasons shifted, he adjusted again, riding through mud, slippery trails, and increasingly unpredictable conditions as injury prevention became paramount 🌧️🌄 It was a monumental achievement for Ben and the sport, and proves that the only limitation is the imagination. We can't wait to see what he conjures up next. Congratulations to Ben on a truly extraordinary accomplishment. SRAM #mtb #benhildred #sportsball #onemillion #datastorytelling

With the MLB season heating up, let’s talk about an underrated billion-dollar industry: baseball cards ⚾️ In 2024 alone, trading card transactions hit $2.6 billion, with individual cards selling for over a million dollars. At their core, cards are just cardboard, but their value stems from rarity, condition, and demand. While demand is tied to player performance, rarity and condition require expertise. So collectors send cards to PSA to gave them "graded" on a 1–10 scale and sealing them in plastic cases. Think of it like buying a Rolex: the grading label is your authentication. Plus PSAs data tells a compelling story of player popularity in real time: 🏆 Aaron Judge saw spikes in graded cards after his Rookie of the Year season (27k cards in 2017) and another surge in 2024 after winning MVP, crossing 50,000 cards graded this year alone. 📈 Shohei Ohtani’s rise is historic. From 83,000 cards in 2022 to 218,000 in 2024, his popularity exploded after his 50/50 milestone and move to the Dodgers. Today, Ohtani sits second all-time in PSA graded baseball cards, trailing only Ken Griffey Jr., and far surpassing Jeter, who's next on that list. Follow SportsBall for more sports data visualizations. #MLB #BaseballCards #Collectibles #shohei #judge #datastorytelling #linkedinsports

Professional golf just wrapped its first season of TGL, the game's newest product ⛳️📺 Co-founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, TGL is an indoor team golf league that's capitalized on three major shifts in the sport: 📍 1. The demand for shorter, faster competition A typical golf broadcast stretches across 12 hours a day over four days. TGL compresses the experience into 2 hours of primetime entertainment, giving fans non-stop action in a traditional team sports viewing capacity. 📍 2. The rise of YouTube golf Millions are now tuning into creators who mix golf with personality, storytelling, and team dynamics. The top 10 YouTube golf channels have 10M+ subscribers and draw 50M+ monthly views. 📍 3. The explosion of alternative golf experiences Indoor golf simulator usage is up 73% since 2019. And in 2022, for the first time ever, off-course golfers outnumbered on-course players in the U.S. Golf is becoming more urban, more social, and more tech-enabled. TGL leans all the way into that trend. The new league capitalizes on all three of these dynamics by blending world-class talent with the most advanced simulator facility ever built. The format is fast, interactive, and gives fans live audio access to players mid-round. And the numbers? ✅ 23.4M total viewers ✅ 864K ESPN primetime avg ✅ Median age: 52—2nd youngest of any major U.S. league Not bad for year one. Thanks David Schaefer, and Kristen Fraser, for helping get this story produced and letting us run with the data 📈 Follow SportsBall for more sports data visualizations #TGL #GolfInnovation #sportsball #IndoorGolf #SportsBusiness #golf #datastorytelling

Each April, a sleepy Southern town transforms into a luxury travel hub—and the data tells a fascinating story ⛳️🛩️ Augusta, Georgia, population 200,000, hosts The Masters, the first of golf’s four major tournaments. Its local airport, typically servicing just 15 commercial flights a day, sees traffic more than double. But the real action is in the private skies: on Masters Friday last year, 292 private jets landed and across the whole week, a staggering 1,331. And that’s just the airspace. On the ground, Augusta’s housing market shifts into high gear. With data from AirDNA, short-term rental listings spike from 1,500 to over 3,000 as homeowners cash in on the 50,000+ golf fans flooding into town. Nightly rates average $656 during the event—triple the annual average, and the one week alone drove 27% of Augusta’s entire yearly short-term rental revenue in 2024. For one week a year, Augusta becomes one of America’s most fascinating seasonal tourism markets—an incredible intersection of sports, travel, and local economics. Follow SportsBall for more sports data visualization. #masters #golf #datastorytelling #airbnb #datavisualization #sportsball #linkedinsports

One of the most iconic records in sports is about to fall 🏒 The National Hockey League (NHL)'s all-time goal-scoring title, long held by Wayne Gretzky, is just 3 goals away from a new owner as Alex Ovechkin is on the verge of breaking the unbreakable. Some more stats on Wayne Gretzky, who didn’t just lead the league, he redefined it. Over two decades, he posted: 🔹 2,857 total points, still 49 percent more than any player in history 🔹 1,963 assists and 894 goals 🔹 15 All-Star appearances, 9 MVPs, and 4 Stanley Cups And here's a bit more on Ovi’s game, which is simple and singular: put the puck in the net. 🔸 55% of his points are goals, compared to 31% for Gretzky 🔸 15 of 20 seasons with more goals than assists 🔸 He's the all-time shots leader in the NHL with more than 6,800 And it's not like Ovechkin is limping to the finish line. Even now, in his 20th season, he is producing at an elite level. NHL EDGE data places Ovechkin in the 88th percentile or higher in: 📈 Shot volume 📈 Shot speed 📈 Shooting percentage 📈 Total goals A generational milestone is happening before our eyes. By season’s end, the NHL should have a new all-time goal scoring leader—and his name will be Alex Ovechkin. Follow SportsBall for more sports data visualizations, and thanks to National Hockey League (NHL) for partnering up on this amazing data story. #linkedinsports #nhl #hockey #goalchase #gretzky #ovechkin

Curious about why Grand Slam Track came about? Confused about the structure? SportsBall has broken it all down for you!