Heatmaps and mixed martial arts, a match made in analytical heaven

Is there a sports fan alive who doesn't enjoy a good heatmap?

Analysis of football, tennis or any sport in which an athlete's motion can be monitored has come on leaps and bounds since the phenomenon of heatmaps were unveiled to the world.

HEAT MAP: Daley Blind was very positionally aware at centre-half tonight but he wasn't stretched by Aston Villa. pic.twitter.com/0UD1WcKJNW

— Squawka Football (@Squawka) August 14, 2015

And MMA is the latest sport to leap aboard the bandwagon, with top statistical organisation Fightmetric adopting the system to display which fighter is controlling the centre of the octagon. Under the unified rules of mixed martial arts, fights are judged based on striking, grappling, aggression and octagon control While the first two elements are easily quantifiable, judges have really struggled with the latter two which has led to several inexplicable decisions over the years. Fightmetric founder Rami Genauer has recently explained how the new method of analysing fights is beneficial to fans' viewing experience as well as the judging. "[This] is just another way of expressing the same kind of statistics," he told MMA Fighting. "We're tracking the location and movement of the fighters and the heatmap is a nice way of plotting that on a graph or plane, so you can display frequency of time spent in a position in an easy way for people to consume." Ganauer goes on to offer examples of how different kinds of fights can be explained using the heatmap system.

"McGregor-Siver is a great example of center control success. What you see is the donut. There's the center of the Octagon and Siver's got a big blank spot. You take a look at McGregor's and he's filled in the donut hole, so all of his orange and yellow are right there smack in the center, where Siver is exactly not.

"If you watch that fight, it was one of those things where, 'Why isn't Siver doing anything about this? Why is he being complacent? Why is he allowing McGregor to let him pot shot?'

"It's very, very difficult to win a fight from the outside if you're opponent is constantly making you circle and circle because you can never set. You can never throw anything with power, as opposed to the guy who is stationary who can dart forward at a moment's notice.

"For the most part, if you're struck on the outside circling, you're losing."

"Neither fighter is on the perimeter. Both of them are standing in the center. They don't move at all. They're just in the pocket, taking shots at each other."

"This is an example of a fight that's all along the fence or in the clinch, at least. You've got vast segment of the Octagon in a five-minute round and yet there's so much of it which is basically untouched because they did spend so much of it against the fence."

"They use a lot of Octagon. It's not like the Cerrone-Makdessi fight where they could be doing the same things - Arlovski and Browne are standing up and striking - but they're doing it in a fundamentally different capacity because they are covering ground, they're taking on different pieces of the Octagon, they're moving."

When one of the key elements of deciding who wins or loses a fight is octagon control and aggression, it seems kind of bizarre that something like this hasn't existed in MMA up until UFC 180, when the system was rolled out by Fightmetric.

"First and foremost, the important thing is to collect as much good data as we can," Ganauer continued. "Ultimately, we're trying to explain the sport and explain the fights. There's going to be fights for which they strikes may not tell the story, the takedowns may not tell the story. One of the stories could be the use of space and the motion or direction of motion. We've seen that quite a bit. Regardless of who is landing the strikes, the fighter who is moving forward is considered winning. Judges certainly value it. I think fans and commentators do as well.

"So, if we can quantify those pieces of information, then we've added another layer onto the sport," he explained. "We can understand it better. We can say there is tremendous value to being the fighter who is moving forward."

H/t to MMAFighting.com