The Ethical Boundaries of AI and Athlete Data in Professional Sports

The Ethical Boundaries of AI and Athlete Data in Professional Sports

Professional sports have witnessed a massive technological revolution in the last decade, driven by the development of data science. Sports are no longer solely reliant on a coach's intuition and a player's physical fitness; they are now managed as a precise engineering process, where every movement, heartbeat, and player decision is measured and digitally analyzed. From GPS trackers monitoring distances to smart cameras analyzing ball movement in dead-hole situations, data has become the "twelfth player" on the field. A technical analysis of this transformation reveals that advances in artificial intelligence have enabled analyses far deeper than simply counting successful or missed passes. Today, algorithms can analyze "hidden behavior." For example, they can analyze the movement of a defense as a whole to identify defensive gaps invisible to the human eye. In football, technologies such as heat maps and cinematic sequences have emerged, showing how tacti…