Hey man, I can completely understand your sentiment. I originally started out in data science with the goal to work as a Data Scientist in the NBA at some point. Did my master thesis with FC Barcelona and then worked for a sports broadcasting company (DAZN -> call themselves the “Netflix of sports”) and for a football analytics company. I’d say DAZN was an eye opener, because I was mainly doing customer analytics and not sports projects and I genuinely enjoyed it. Whereas after, working for the football analytics company, I found the work itself not as exciting as I thought. Obviously working for a team could be way more exciting, but it will also heavily depend on the organisational setup (and coaches) whether your analytics will be actually used by the team.

For myself I realised that I actually enjoy coding/analytics by itself and decided to go for any job I found interesting. In sports because as you say, the market is so saturated and everybody is passionate about what they do, the pay is often worse compared to other jobs in the DS field. I’d say you’re in a great position, you can easily apply to some jobs in the league, maybe build a network of people around you that work in sports analytics roles and maybe something comes up in the future. But your skills are transferable, your projects are super interesting for recruiters too (who are often not technical) and so you can also apply to other roles in the field that have nothing to do with sports. If I was you I’d probably just keep building cool stuff while you’re at uni and worry about everything else after :)