With the rapid growth of information technology and sports, analyzing sports information has become an increasingly challenging issue. Sports big data come from the Internet and show a rapid growth trend. Sports big data contain rich information such as athletes, coaches, athletics, and swimming. Nowadays, various sports data can be easily accessed, and amazing data analysis technologies have been developed, which enable us to further explore the value behind these data. In this paper, we first introduce the background of sports (...) big data. Secondly, we review sports big data management such as sports big data acquisition, sports big data labeling, and improvement of existing data. Thirdly, we show sports data analysis methods, including statistical analysis, sports social network analysis, and sports big data analysis service platform. Furthermore, we describe the sports big data applications such as evaluation and prediction. Finally, we investigate representative research issues in sports big data areas, including predicting the athletes’ performance in the knowledge graph, finding a rising star of sports, unified sports big data platform, open sports big data, and privacy protections. This paper should help the researchers obtaining a broader understanding of sports big data and provide some potential research directions. (shrink)