Introduction

Sports activities have already been reported in ancient times, not only for entertainment reasons but also for rituals and cultural circumstances. Physical and also mental activities played a crucial role in these times and are still important today. The biggest difference to sports, as we know it today, is the fact that nowadays we are able to measure, record, store, manage, analyze, and visualize any kind of data related to sports in a much more efficient and effective way as it could have been done centuries ago. This effect is due to the growing impact of digitalization and not only caused by the growing interest in sports fields but also mainly by the progress in hardware and software technologies, typically in the computer and data science domains, that have to keep pace with the growing amount of sports data. Hardware, in particular, is becoming cheaper, allowing one to record and store larger and larger datasets, which was still a problem a few decades ago. However, just storing data does not lead to success, researchers and data consumers have to dig in the data with modern advanced analysis methods to identify patterns and anomalies that hint at certain issues worth improving.