On January 17th, we went to visit Opta Sport.  Opta Sport, founded in 1996, was created to analyze data

about  Premier League football.  Today they have expanded their work to analyzing 30 sports across 70 different countries, and have over 800 teams and clients that use Opta’s analytics.

When we first walked into the Opta’s building, we were in a lobby that was very interesting to look around.  The first thing I noticed was a television that was running a program about an in depth analysis for the upcoming World Cup this summer, which talked about every team’s odds to win the tournament, along with the chances that teams make it to certain round of the World Cup.  On the right hand wall of the lobby, there were 3 larger than life pictures of American football player Odell Beckham, tennis player Serena Williams, and basketball player Steph Curry.  On the left hand wall were 3 more athletes: football (soccer) player Cristiano Ronaldo, golfer Jason Day, and a cricketer we were unable to identify.  There were also interesting pictures on doors and the wall of the lobby too, such as one of Arrowhead Stadium and one of FC Bayern players.

The first part of our Opta Sport experience was going into a room that were filled with television screens

and people typing away in front of their computers.  We talked to two employees who were showing us how they keep stats for football games.  They were using the first leg of the Chelsea vs Arsenal Carabao Cup game as an example for us to follow and it was crazy to even try to keep up with what they were doing.  They were following where the ball went, via dribbling, passing and shooting, while simultaneously tracking each time a ball was touched by a player.  This meant they were constantly clicking their mouse to register a ball touch, while dragging where the ball was going on their screen that represented a soccer field, and somehow changing the number of the player who had the ball all at the same time.  They gave us the opportunity to try to replicate their jobs, and it took a while to register a single movement of the ball, which takes about 1 second of real time.  It just showed how impressive it was that they could move that fast to track a whole game in real time.

The second phase of our visit was a presentation given by Edwin White and Tom Reynolds. The

presentation provided us with information on everything Opta, including who they work with. Some of the largest names in broadcasting, sports betting, online sports coverage, and the best leagues and clubs in the world use Opta for their statistical analysis. Some of these include: ESPN, DirecTV, Fox Sports, NBC, Sky Bet, CNN, Yahoo and many, many more. The EPL, Bundesliga, and most of the major football leagues around the world also use Opta for its statistics along with some of the best individual clubs in the world such as FC Barcelona, Manchester City, and Bayern Munich. Individual clubs often use the statistics to aid in the scouting of players. Any EPL match watched in the United States uses Opta stats and graphics that are gathered and presented live from Opta.

Opta’s statistics and analysis are so sought after that teams pay upwards of 20,000 pounds for the player data that they gather to help the clubs with their scouting and analysis. It was really interesting when they started showing us how Opta can be used.  They showed us how their data can be used for scouting.  There seemed to be about a thousand possible filters to search for.  In our example, we were looking for a holding midfielder, under 24 years old, who has played over 10 games and has above an 80% pass completion and the program was able to give a list of about 15 players in the Premier League.  They also showed us how players from the previous season performed compared to their expectations (expectations were calculated by a very complicated algorithm).  A third way that the program proved helpful was looking at every pass made my Leicester City over the past few games and we could see where they liked to play the ball the most.  There were many other potential uses for their programs which seem to be very useful so it’s no surprise that 19 out of the 20 Premier League teams look to Opta for their data.