Capturing the ‘expert’s eye’: A perspective on developing a better understanding and implementation of subjective performance evaluations in team sports

Abstract

Subjective evaluations of athletic performance are an important part of decision making across sporting organisations. Based on their expertise and intuition, coaches select their starting line-ups, scouts recommend or discourage teams from signing new potential players, and academy directors decide which players should move up or out of a team’s academy system. While this intuitive evaluation of performance occurs constantly throughout sport, little attention has been given to how this process can be more formally designed, implemented, and assessed to capture these expert evaluations of performance more effectively and thereby better inform decision making within sports organisations. In this opinion paper, the discrepancy between how often subjective evaluations are used in practice and how little research exists regarding their development, implementation, and effectiveness is examined. To assist in moving the sport science field forward, this paper will attempt to define subjective performance evaluations, describe the potential benefits that sporting organisations may get from using them, detail existing and potential uses for these measures, provide a framework for understanding how subjective data collection, and call upon the academic and applied sport community to drive the subjective evaluation field further.