Orlando, FL – March 5, 2017 – Orlando City Stadium: Taylor Twellman during a regular season Major League Soccer game. (Photo by Dionisio Gonzalez Rondon / ESPN Images)
The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.
Name: Andrew Cox
Company: Opta (Perform Group)
Position: Executive Vice President
Andrew Cox is currently an Executive Vice President of Data Strategy and Partnerships with Opta, a global sports data provider. Cox is responsible for developing and implementing strategic partnerships for the sports data businesses operating within the wider Perform Group, including the overarching commercial and account management strategy for the Opta business.
1) What utilization of technology in professional or college sports has recently blown you away and why?
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the pace of technical innovation around the business of sports. It’s such a constant. Considering this question through the prism of sports data as a fan, rather than from an Opta business perspective, I’ve always been impressed by the PGA’s commitment to getting ahead of the curve through technology, certainly from a data capture perspective. Realizing commercial value, outside of just sponsorship, and utilizing the intelligence from ShotLink data has gotten much better of late too, as stakeholders start to better understand how the data can be applied from an analytical and visualization perspective. Such data strategies can become self-fulfilling as it stimulates lots of secondary interest in the TOUR, its tournaments and its playing talent, benefiting not only the PGA directly but supporting the advancement of the sport as a whole. There are a number of federations who ought to be prepared to invest in these fundamentals around sports data, while acknowledging the necessity of strategic partnerships to help fully realize associated commercial opportunities.
2) Name and describe one unique case for how Opta is working with a media entity to distribute data.
Given today’s general fascination with data, it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t all that long ago that we had to work pretty hard to coerce some publishers that the soccer data we had at our disposal could contribute to their own storytelling. One of the outlets that needed no persuasion was ESPN, who have continued to embrace the unique soccer data and insights that Opta are able to provide and who then do an amazing job bringing this data to life. Our long-term data partnership sees our content distributed across all ESPN platforms and brands, globally, powering live scores right through to data editorial and analytics.
3) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?
Anything that gives me some hours in my day back. A technology that automatically captures and documents those abstract thoughts we all have, usually at the most inopportune moments, would be great. And if it made commercial sense of even some of them, then even better!
4) As a sports fan, what sports-related service, app, product, etc., could you not live without and why?
It’s fair to say that sports betting and fantasy football apps are probably draining too much power on my devices than they should. Content from Perform Group brands, whether that’s Opta, Omnisport or RunningBall, are more often than not powering the front-end experience and helping to turn passive experiences into interactive or transactional ones. Meanwhile, the accuracy and integrity of our data is relied on by the world’s leading sportsbooks and gaming operators to automate backend systems, from quantitative analysis and odds compilation right through to settlement. At least I can justify my time (and money) spent as bona fide client research!
5) If you had to project 20 years into the future, how will professional sports teams, leagues and media companies package data for fan consumption?
Emergent technologies are going to continue to have a huge impact on the sports data industry in terms of content creation, distribution and consumption. It’s a hugely exciting time and the raw data available will continue to become richer, more voluminous and ubiquitously available across more sports, from professional through to grassroots. Alongside this, everyone will become better at determining what’s relevant and what isn’t. The machines will definitely be telling us by then! At the same time certain challenges are fairly apparent — whisper it quietly but an over-reliance on technology still requires a significant leap of faith, not to mention investment, when it comes to assurances over data quality. Legalities of data rights and ownership are inevitably becoming more prevalent and there is clearly a potential for that to stifle access and innovation. Twenty years might just be long enough for some of those debates to be resolved.
6) Give us your bold prediction about a form of technology that will be integral to sports in general over the next 12 months and why?
Recurring themes in this series are musings around Artificial Intelligence, AR and VR and I don’t doubt that developments in these areas will continue to dominate many of our thoughts. Personalization and alternatives to text-based search are powerful concepts in terms of immediacy, appropriateness and efficiency of access to content. This is already creating new opportunities around consumption but it also brings efficiencies to media production workflows, while from a performance analysis and modeling perspective enables us to investigate what we can’t easily explain or put into language. The data and metadata derived from Opta collection methodologies are facilitating advancements in all of these areas.
