A Survey of Large Models in Sports

Sports have witnessed growing global enthusiasm in recent years, serving as a vital force for physical health, cultural exchange, social connection, and economic growth. The rapid advancement of large models, particularly (multimodal) large language models (M)LLMs, has demonstrated transformative potential to reshape sports understanding, analysis, and interaction across diverse domains. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of large models in sports, including (i) an overview of tasks and applications across different participant groups; (ii) a detailed analysis of sports-related datasets and benchmarks; and (iii) a critical discussion of current challenges and future directions. Our goal is to establish a foundation for advancing research and practical development of large-model-driven sports intelligence. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained at: https://github.com/Road2Redemption/Awesome_Large_Models_In_Sports1.

EgoEsportsQA: An Egocentric Video Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in Esports

While video large language models (Video-LLMs) excel in understanding slow-paced, real-world egocentric videos, their capabilities in high-velocity, information-dense virtual environments remain under-explored. Existing benchmarks focus on daily activities, yet lack a rigorous testbed for evaluating fast, rule-bound reasoning in virtual scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce EgoEsportsQA, a pioneering video question-answering (QA) benchmark for grounding perception and reasoning in expert esports knowledge. We curate 1,745 high-quality QA pairs from professional matches across 3 first-person shooter games via a scalable six-stage pipeline. These questions are structured into a two-dimensional decoupled taxonomy: 11 sub-tasks in the cognitive capability dimension (covering perception and reasoning levels) and 6 sub-tasks in the esports knowledge dimension. Comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art Video-LLMs reveal that current models still fail to achieve satisfactory performance, with the best model only 71.58%. The results expose notable gaps across both axes: models exhibit stronger capabilities in basic visual perception than in deep tactical reasoning, and they grasp overall macro-progression better than fine-grained micro-operations. Extensive ablation experiments demonstrate the intrinsic weaknesses of current Video-LLM architectures. Further analysis suggests that our dataset not only reveals the connections between real-world and virtual egocentric domains, but also offers guidance for optimizing downstream esports applications, thereby fostering the future advancement of Video-LLMs in various egocentric environments.