Ross MacEacharnPerform
ROSS MACEACHARN is the CEO of Perform. His division of the company includes 1,400 full-time employees. That number is closer to 3,000 if you include freelancers, MacEacharn said. Of those 1,400, approximately 700 or 800 are in operations functions, handling the company's data collection and creating content. Perform provides "really deep Opta data" of soccer, rugby, cricket and the top American sports, which are among the 40-plus sports the company analyzes "to varying levels." MacEacharn spoke to SBD Global about Perform's future during a recent interview in N.Y.
On Perform's recent restructure ...
Ross MacEacharn: Perform Group has been rebranded DAZN Group, and we have two divisions now, rather than the four divisions that we used to have. You have DAZN and you have Perform. The reason we've done that is to enable us as a division to be entirely in control of our technical roadmap, all of our product development, all of our development resources and our development priorities.
On what to expect from Perform ...
MacEacharn: Obviously, we're going to be growing our business in North America in the betting space. It's an exciting opportunity for us. Our core content portfolio is going to be of interest to the North American betting operators, but we will also have conversations with the U.S. sports leagues about potentially becoming a data distributor for them. Those conversations are ongoing.
On Perform's goals ...
MacEacharn: We want to really grow aggressively. We've set ourselves some fairly ambitious goals as to what we want to achieve in terms of growing the business. We will need to invest in certain areas and we hope to do that. I can't really say to what degree or how that will look at the moment, because I don't want to tell everyone what our ambitions are, but we will make some significant investments in people and technology and potentially in rights to enable us to really drive and grow the business. That's the real focus moving forward.
On the company's current global footprint ...
MacEacharn: We've got sales people in every continent. ... We're already a global business. North America is probably a smaller component of the wider piece at the moment, but that will grow.
On Perform's partnership with MLS ...
MacEacharn: We're the official data partner of MLS, so we do a lot of work with MLS and we've been a partner of theirs for many years. If you watch the MLS broadcasts, that's all our data that's powering the on-screen graphics. We do a lot of innovative work with them to try and come up with new metrics to tell new stories. Something we've done with them quite recently is the expected goals metric.
On the biggest challenges his company faces ...
MacEacharn: The rights space within North America is interesting at the moment. Exactly what our role is in the data distribution world in North America is something that we're working on at the moment. It's an opportunity as much as a challenge, and the conversations are moving quickly.
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