Sports Data: Sources, Infrastructure, and Governance in AI Era

Sports data encompasses the information generated through athletic competition, training, athlete monitoring, and the commercial activities of sport, forming the foundation of the modern sports industry and supporting evidence-based decision-making across the sports ecosystem. In the AI era, sports data has assumed an even greater role because artificial intelligence both depends on data for model development and produces new forms of data through technologies such as computer vision and simulation. Major sources of sports data include human event coding, in-venue tracking systems, wearable sensors, computer vision, fan behavior data, and synthetic data. The effective use of these data requires appropriate infrastructure for collection, storage, integration, and management. Meanwhile, the increasing volume, detail, and value of sports data have brought issues of ownership, privacy, integrity, and access to the forefront of sports data governance.