New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox
Location: Foxboro and Boston, Mass.
CEOs: Robert Kraft/Larry Lucchino
Revenues: $250 million/$206 million
What they do: New England’s top sports franchises compete at the top of the National Football League and Major League Baseball, respectively.
Disruptive qualities: Say what you will about the 18-1 Patriots (How could they have blown the Super Bowl like that?) and the World Series Champion Red Sox, but they are leading the way in transforming professional sports through their use of business intelligence and analytics software for game planning and player recruitment.
The tech that makes them tick: For the Patriots, winning business has largely been about building the most robust e-commerce infrastructure in the league. Not only did the team’s 18-1 season generate a blitz of traffic from fans buying team gear, it also made the site a constant target of hackers from rival cities. Despite its success, the Pats’ site is being retooled this off-season to improve search, add registries for local sports teams and improve visitor experience. As for the Sox, the team hired some of the best analytical minds in the business and spared no expense in acquiring sophisticated scouting software, computerized video analysis and business-intelligence tools for mining the stacks of statistics at its disposal. The goal is to identify the best available talent, get it before rival teams do, then figure out how long to keep it before it stops producing.
Who they are disrupting: These two teams have wounded the New York Yankees, the Colorado Rockies and much of the AFC, but regrettably not the Giants or the ‘72 Dolphins … yet.
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