When it comes to data, context will always be king

How Opta is going beyond the numbers to provide greater understanding for football fans.

How Opta is going beyond the numbers to provide greater understanding for football fans.

by Simon Farrant, Marketing Manager, Opta

As the world’s leading sports data organisation, Opta collects live, detailed statistics on thousands of football matches every year, from all round the world. In every single one of these, we record approximately 2000 on-the-ball actions from every game, including the on-pitch position of every on-ball action as well as the player responsible.

We provide this information to clients in a number of different sectors: the clubs themselves, for use in player recruitment, opposition scouting and squad analysis; bookmakers, for bet settlement, odds- setting and marketing purposes and governing bodies like the Premier League and MLS, to act as the official data provider and power their websites and fantasy games. Over a million people follow us on Twitter, and our work is featured in the most read newspapers and used by the leading football broadcasters across the world.

So why has this type of detailed statistical information become so popular, and why has it grown to such an extent? To understand that, it’s important to understand how what it means to be a football fan has developed over the last ten to fifteen years.

By primarily focusing on the context rather than the statistic itself, we aim to provide greater understanding for football fans, rather than just publishing an isolated number.

The proliferation of portals offered to sports fans means that there are more ways to consume football than ever before. Twenty-four-hour sports news channels, online news sites, second screen offerings and dedicated mobile and tablet apps all add to the blanket coverage that follows top-level football today.

To be a football fan, it used to be important to pick up the newspapers the day after a match to read match reports, or to make sure you were near a radio for the half — and full-time round-ups. If you wanted to actually see the goals you needed to watch Match of the Day, and, depending on where you lived, a regional roundup of (some of) the goals on local news. And if you missed your window, that was it until the next week.

Being a football fan required some level of investment to be in the right place at the right time throughout the season. The knowledge you had as a fan was very much earned. But with the increasing coverage of football on TV came at the same time as an increase in the ways for media to report on it. Over a short period of time, we went from having a select number of opportunities to follow football to being able to keep abreast of the action every minute of every day, with coverage from all of the leagues around the world.

Traditional media have realised that football is a great way of selling their TV station or newspaper, and, add to this the internet, with no restriction on space or layout. Thanks to the growth of online devices, football coverage can be tapped into regardless of location or device. You no longer follow football, it follows you. And with this thirst for information, and proliferation of opportunity comes a desire for more in-depth information. And the world of data and stats has grown to support this.

Whereas 20 years ago it would have been difficult to find out what the score was if you were out of your house, now you can find out, in real-time, how many passes a particular player has completed during a game thanks to collection centres all around the world.

However, not everyone is a fan. We’ve been criticised in the past for being the very antithesis to romance in football. Some feel that, by providing objective and factual information about what occurs on a football pitch, data providers such as Opta are destroying the sanctity of the sport and somehow burying Maradona’s slaloming goal against England in the 86 World Cup, Ronnie Radford’s FA Cup piledriver against Newcastle and the entirety of the 1992 Denmark squad in an avalanche of .XML feeds and Excel spreadsheets.

An article from last year, published in the (excellent) When Saturday Comes, rhetorically questioned the need for “stats and graphics to tell us what we can already see… Did anyone ever watch one of Zinedine Zidane’s famous pirouettes and remark that he has a high proportion of completed dribbles?” and claimed, when referring to people who prefer to analyse the number of successful aerial duels won by a full back rather than just enjoying a flying winger eviscerating an opponent, that “these people don’t deserve football.”

As with any subject, context is vital. Having worked closely with the many of the leading sports broadcasters, newspapers and websites across the world, we understand that for many football fans, detailed football statistics are often best used as an accompaniment to more ‘traditional’ football media. The most widely-lauded journalists and pundits, such as Gary Neville on Monday Night Football, use Opta data and consult our expert editorial teams to support and provide greater context to their opinions on a specific player, team or game.

The vast majority of people collecting, collating and editorialising Opta data are dedicated football fans (who are scarily good at pub quizzes) first, and statisticians second. The success of our @OptaJoe Twitter account is also largely due to a well- developed understanding of what makes a statistic interesting. By primarily focusing on the context rather than the statistic itself, we aim to provide greater understanding for football fans, rather than just publishing an isolated number.

The thirst for detailed statistical information doesn’t seem to be slowing down. We now cover over 40 different football competitions in full detail every year, and work hard to ensure that the information we are collecting is as accurate and consistent as possible. Our aim remains the same as it always has been — to provide new information that football fans will find interesting. And, we’re all romantics at heart, I promise.