Why live scouting is best delivered from the venues?

Whenever you see sports data displayed during a game, no matter whether it’s a big game or not, you need to remember, there’s is a human touch behind it, literally! No, we are not talking about the touches taken by players such as free kicks or a great pass. We are talking about all the hard work from those scouting these events. These guy’s and girls work hard to bring you all the live-action and report every incident. They are at there best when they have the opportunity to operate from the venue and can provide you with all their data at the lowest latency.    

HOW TO ANALYSE FOOTBALL

Before scouts can be sent to games, we need to agree on something. Of course, by this, we mean rules, bloody rules! What do we mean? Let us explain with an example of what’s involved when scouting e.g. a football match (soccer). While it’s quite easy to agree on when a goal has been scored, it’s not so straight forward when we need to decide things like what’s a short pass or medium pass? Is it a short pass up to 5 meters? Or should that be up to 10 meters?

Then it starts to get even more complicated when we try to determine if a pass was successful or not (some scouting systems recognize and name this incident differently). Is the success determined by the quality of the pass or who receives the pass? Simply put – if I pass the ball to player A, but I do it so badly that it’s received by player B, who is also a teammate, can we still say that the pass was successful?

You may think that these kinds of questions are silly, but if you want unified and reliable sports data measurements, you need to make sure that you have a clear methodology that can be used for every game.

THE FASTEST SPORTS DATA

Then we come to the issue of latency. As you can imagine, sports data is collected with the use of the trained scouts at the stadiums and by using live TV streams or feeds. Of course, this means the first method has a much lower latency than the latter, no one can determine the exact delay caused by sending the signal from the venue to the streaming feeds. So the scout working at the venue can code an incident (shot, pass, etc.) as it happens, while his colleague working from a TV feed has to wait until it’s aired.

Understanding how important it is for media and – especially – betting organizations to get the fastest sports statistics, data collecting companies everywhere have decided to increase the number of scouts they place at venues.

Of course, this has made collecting the data much more expensive, meaning higher costs for us data suppliers. This is why STATSCORE has decided to seek out and secure so-called “official data rights” contracts with several top European leagues to provide exclusive data from their games.

Learn more: Get familiar with STATSCORE ScoutsFeed!

This is a win-win situation, the leagues get the official data to enrich both what they offer their fans and the professional image of the competitions they provide. while STATSCORE can distribute the data for an honest remuneration and secure a higher level of quality data for the leagues at a fair price.

If you want to get in touch to find out more, just contact our Customer Success Team at cst@statscore.com or use the LiveChat service on our website. We will be more than happy to schedule a call and discuss how ScoutsFeed can help your organization!