Sports Data

Sports data is the raw material behind football, basketball and racing titles: player positions, events on the pitch, timings and the statistics derived from them. Capturing it means operating tracking systems during a live match, calibrating them beforehand and watching the feed while the game runs, because a gap in the data cannot be recorded again afterwards.

The work is as much about quality control as about technology. Plausibility checks, thresholds and match reports catch errors while there is still time to correct them, and the handover to post-match analysis has to be documented well enough that someone else can trace where a figure came from. Shifts follow the fixture list rather than office hours, which means evenings and weekends.

In a studio this skill sits between the live operations side and the teams building the sports titles themselves, and it differs from general data analysis in that the data is produced under time pressure rather than queried from a warehouse.