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People and Pop Culture

The Sit-Down: Ulrich Harmuth, Sportradar

The Sportradar executive talks about how his company, which once concentrated solely on monitoring for fraud in the gambling markets, has found new horizons in packaging data for distribution to fans.

Photo by: SPORTRADAR

A
bout three years ago, we decided that just serving bookmaker clients will not give us enough space to grow.

We basically identified that sports data, which is what we’re providing to those companies, is actually useful to the market in other ways and therefore we decided that [we would] also create the digital sports unit.

We improved the technology of [Minneapolis-based acquisition Sports Data] … and felt we could now go to league partnerships. And that’s when the NFL [and] then the NHL [deals happened]. (Last week, Sportradar added a fraud detection partnership to its core data agreement with the NHL.)

If you take the data that are available for football games 20 years ago, it’s significantly less data compared to what you have today. Not only because of the tracking data, which creates a complete new dimension in terms of data, also the play-by-play data has been [improved].

We believe that a lot of consumers can’t digest the data if you only provide them with the data feeds. You have to provide them with a package solution.

We want to create products that are based on the direction a certain game takes that are different and are automatically updated. Then editors, guys who are managing digital platforms, can basically pick data solutions and visualizations which are relevant for that particular moment in time.

If you take soccer, there are many games where the results are rather boring, but it might be strategically quite an interesting game. We try to put soccer fans in a position that they are not only fans, but they become experts on the game.

They know why a coach is making certain decisions and they know, based on statistics, why a game is moving in a certain direction. That’s what we try to automize and make entertaining stories for fans.

Since the amount of raw data is increasing year after year, we believe you have to create context and tell a story with the data.

We have fraud detection units, which are monitoring the international bookmaker markets. Compare those with the theorical ops development and if you see discrepancies, then we can analyze what is happening.

We have the fraud detection partnerships; we have distribution partnerships, where we take the data from the league and distribute; and then we have development partnerships. The NFL I would qualify as a development partnership.

They actually chose us at the time because we’re not only a data distribution partner. We actually take their data and create products out of it.

The NFL decided one or two years ago that every player should be tracked. Every player has chips in his shoulder pads.

Every moment in time you know the exact position of the player, you know the acceleration, the velocity. … This is millions of data points that are collected in an NFL game.

Two years ago, there was no tracking data and the amount of data that was available was really not very extensive. But now it’s really changing. There are so many data sources in the market that you have to productize the data.
 
We have two big segments in our company: One is the betting segment and the other is the digital sports segment. … We believe in two or three years from now we should have 50 percent of our business in both directions.

We just invested into a small company that provides cricket data. We believe cricket is a huge market.

In the end, [esports is] very similar to traditional sports. You have players, and we have their performance against their previous performances.

The statistics might be different ones, but the methodology at the end is the same.

If you take an esports event, it has as many fans as a big soccer event. The streaming numbers are really impressive. It’s also a very global phenomenon.

In the past, a lot of data was consumed pregame and postgame. We believe real-time data consumption during the game is crucial. We’ve invested a lot into it.

It’s a fan-specific individual experience. Whether you’re supporting team A or team B you probably want to follow the team in a different way and you want to fit the statistics more for your team.

We are a b-to-b company, so we won’t distribute our data directly to consumers.

The fan who is following the game on social media, he wants a different experience than someone who sees it on broadcast. That’s where you have to get very granular and understand what your customers actually want and build products that engage them.

We try to use the U.S. market as a flagship or development area for our digital sports unit. … We expect that we will continue to grow here.

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