Top-flight English and Scottish football leagues have renewed Press Association Sport‘s contract to offer real-time match data, now including animations of player movements rich field-of-play stats, around the world from next year.
The wire has been the exclusive collector, manager and supplier of match flashes for Football DataCo – the data arm of the English and Scottish Premier Leagues plus the Football League – within the UK since the Premier League’s inception in 2001. Now it’s also won a worldwide contract for 2010/11, 2011/12 and 2012/13 following competitive tender; including new features…
— Rich match data Live player movements: PA will use data from match and player tracking company Amisco, a company that tracks player movements using stadia-mounted cameras (see demo video and Rafael Benitez using it). PA tells paidContent:UK: “Where live video streams are available, this content will be captured and delivered to our customers as live. Or, in matches where this is not the case, we may still be able to capture richer data sets post-match. The data captured will include some positional data to demonstrate player movement and the like but will not go as far as player tracking data, which the leagues have yet to take a view on.” Update: PA says its data from Amisco will include number of passes per attack, number of shots from open play, balls won per pitch zone, fouls made per zone, number of forward/backward/sideways passes and tackles won/lost, but not player movements.
— More real-time web: “The focus for product development is to reach a wider audience by delivering data to different platforms including web, mobile, TV graphics and desktop. This is live data with real time statistics and can be delivered in multiple languages worldwide.”
— Supplying to US: Data will be supplied through Chicago-based Stats LLC, the sports info provider that bought out PA SportsTicker in March, on distribution in America and Japan.
— How about goal flash tweets?: “Social networking sites are on the agenda, although character limits and the lack of graphical capabilities on some of them can be inhibiting for the display of live data.”
Meanwhile, Satellite Information Services (SIS) has won the tender to supply football data to betting companies.