Sports data is the record of every pass, shot, tackle and play of a match, collected live and sold to broadcasters, bookmakers, teams and media. A sports data company covers thousands of matches a year in many sports and leagues. In football, these include England's Premier League, Spain's La Liga and Europe's Champions League. In American football, they include the NFL, the professional league of the United States. The best-known football statistics appear in TV graphics and in match reports.
How is a match recorded? For football, trained data collectors watch live video of each match, often from an office far from the stadium. Using special software, they log each event as it happens: who passed, from where on the pitch, to whom, and whether the pass reached him. One football match produces a few thousand such events. A second collector checks the log, and each event is sent to customers within seconds. Some leagues also install camera systems that track the position of every player and of the ball many times a second.
Take, for example, a Premier League match played in England on a Saturday afternoon. In the 63rd minute, a striker shoots from the edge of the penalty area. Within two seconds, the collector has logged the shot, its position and the foot he used. Three kinds of customer use the same event at once. The broadcaster's graphics show the striker's shots for the season. Bookmakers in the UK, where betting on sport is legal, update their odds on the next goal. This live setting of odds is explained in in-play odds, and it runs inside sportsbook software. And the club's analysts add the shot to a model that estimates how likely such a shot is to score, called expected goals, or xG. An xG of 0.08 means that similar shots score about 8 times in 100.
Teams use the data to find players. A club can compare every left back in thirty leagues by passes, tackles and distance run, before it sends a scout to watch the best five in person. In American football in the US, one company watches video of every play and grades every player on it, and teams and TV commentators use those grades.
On top of the data, companies sell models that predict results, used by media and by forecasting teams. Niche news sites about sport use the statistics in their articles.
What about India? Betting on sport is not legal in most of India. Fantasy sports apps used live cricket data to score their users' teams, but a 2025 law banned such real-money gaming apps from playing for money. Broadcasters and teams in India still buy match data.
Selling the same live event to many buyers is a typical data as a service business. Speed matters most to bookmakers: the faster the data arrives, the less time a bettor has to bet on something that has already happened.