This interview was conducted and shared by Diego Valdes, the Director of the Sports Business Institute of Barcelona.
Data analytics have come to play an important role in the football industry today.
Clubs look to gain a competitive edge on and off the pitch, and big data is allowing them to extract insights to improve player performance, prevent injuries and increase their commercial efficiency. However, contextualizing the information and extracting valuable insights is not always an easy task. Oscar Ugaz, Former Digital Business Manager at Real Madrid spoke to us about the opportunities and challenges regarding data analytics in football.
The following interview will analyze the latest big data trends in football and answer some questions about the future of analytics in the sports industry.
What is the main challenge facing sports properties regarding data analytics?
I think there is an 80/20 challenge between how much money you are investing in software versus how much money you are investing in brainpower to analyze all the data and analytics that you are obtaining.
Today people are fascinated with data capture and want to have all these fl ashy products, but they are not investing in people that are capable of understanding the business, taking all that data and extracting insights out of it.
Properties should be investing eighty percent in professionals capable of understanding the data and twenty percent in software and technology to extract it. Data is everywhere. What is very scarce is professionals capable of analyzing it.
How has the way fans consume sport changed because of the new technological advances? In reality it hasn´t changed so much. That is the reason that, for example, there is still a lot of money that broadcasters pay for sports rights. People are still consuming live sports. It doesn’t matter that you are millennial or have a special interest in technology. You are always going to sit down and watch the live event mostly on your TV.
What has happened is that sports consumption has been enhanced in other ways. Apart from watching and commenting the match on a second screen, the big opportunity that all these new technologies have created is the possibility to offer content beyond the game. To access what happens the other six days where there is no live content.
That is the big opportunity, however not all sports properties are working on it. They are focusing on the big game event every Sunday or Saturday or every 4 years. What are they going to produce out of these live moments to keep those fans interested? What type of content, products or services are the sports properties going to offer during all that time to keep millennials and digital savvy consumers engaged?
How can you turn the fan experience into something that adds value to the consumer and the football club?
You have to be very cautious and very respectful for the time of the new digital consumer. At the last Leaders conference in London, one of the keynote speakers made an interesting point in stating that we are competing for one minute of a consumer’s time against two other billion offers.
Football clubs, for example, don’t understand this. They think they are very important and that as a result people will be interested in what they have to offer whatever it may be. This may be true the day of the match, however, the remaining days is where the real challenge lies. Nowadays fans don’t have enough time and they don’t have enough money. How are you going to take advantage of that limited time and share of pocket?
That is why you have to analyze very closely what these people want, how they behave, how they consume media, what is the content that they find interesting, etc. Don’t try to throw at them the traditional stuff. That is not interesting for them. You are competing for limited resources. That is a very different approach that for example football clubs apply when they sell traditional sponsorship deals, expensive tickets or TV rights.
How can analytics help football clubs on the business side?
Nowadays when you create a new digital product or service you must start with a minimum valuable proposition that is based on information analysis and insights about your potential user.
You must then launch these small products within a limited segment of hardcore users and then start capturing more information. You start testing hypotheses about how these users are consuming and using the product or service in order to adapt or reconfigure it. You need to define if you can continue along the same line or make adjustments, or discontinue a part or the whole project. Maybe the entire value proposition does not make any sense. So based on feedback data you grow this small product and eventually decide if it’s ready for a bigger market. Unfortunately this is not the way in which you launch new products in a mature business organization like a football club. As a traditional and powerful marketing manager at a top club told me recently “sponsors don’t buy deals in blueprint”.
A more traditional way in which a football club can use data is to identify the profile of fans via a CRM strategy. However, to be relevant, this data needs to be very specific. Not just the basic information about age, gender or location, but rather an in-depth analysis about interests, behaviors and consumption patterns.
For example, there are certain sports properties in the United States that are analyzing the traffic of their websites using cookies. They discovered that before and after fans visit the team official website and then go and buy certain products online. After analyzing the data for several weeks and months they establish a very clear pattern.
If you then take this information, which is based on hard data, and you give it to your sponsorship department, they will be able to make a very convincing proposal to the companies behind the products and services the fans are visiting after they get out of our website. You are not just selling brand awareness space but a segment of potential consumers. That’s not the usual sponsorship proposal. It’s a stronger and more relevant type of partner deal based on deep and objective data analysis.
What are the latest trends you are seeing when it comes to contextualizing big data for football clubs?
When it comes to game tactics, player performance, injury prevention, etc., there is indeed a more relevant level of innovation in regards to data centric solutions. Companies like OPTA and others are creating very interesting and groundbreaking solutions in those areas. But my perception is that football clubs, at least in Europe, are not making an extensive use of data in the business field.
Clubs are still trying to find ways to contextualize different silos of information in a time where there’s still no need on the business side to exploit the potential of the data. The traditional business is still highly profi table and clubs sell tickets, TV rights and sponsorships at a premium rate. They are still brand awareness platforms so the traditional model of commercialization is very present.
Sponsors and broadcasting rights bidders are not approaching the clubs with sophisticated demands about their data insights. There are a few sophisticated sponsors that are introducing these conditions in their deals but it´s not so common. So, the demand for big data solutions remains relatively low.
There is still a lot of room for improvement and maybe when the properties, sponsors and rights holders understand the opportunity cost of underestimating data based innovating projects we will see a relevant shift into this type of approach. Meanwhile the old joke of teenage sex applies to big data sports: Everyone is talking about it, not everyone is doing itand the ones who boast more are not doing it well or doing it at all.