Opta
Data is now so firmly entrenched within soccer that it seems peculiar that there was a time when analytics were treated with suspicion and derision, at least in the UK.
Whereas sports like baseball and cricket have long revelled in the minutiae, informing how they are played, watched and understood, the extent of analysis within soccer was limited to a few pockets of innovation around the world and rudimentary metrics.
Now, data is everywhere – from performance and recruitment through to media coverage and sponsorship activations – with more advanced insights changing the way soccer is covered.
At this summer’s World Cup in North America, data is playing a crucial role in how many fans experience the tournament, supported by increasingly sophisticated collection and analysis methods and an entire industry of specialist vendors, which includes Stats Perform. Symbolically, data is being collected by the firm’s Opta team – which kickstarted soccer’s data-driven transformation in the late 1990s.
Opta analyst use sophisticated methods to calculate data used across the sport (Image credit: Opta)
The Opta Index
Prior to Opta’s pioneering work, the most infamous use of data in English soccer was the work of Charles Reep, whose notational methods were groundbreaking, but his analysis became associated with the long ball game.
The advent of the Premier League in 1992 both widened the audience and increased the volume and quality of broadcast coverage, sparking new ways of experiencing the sport. This included fantasy soccer, a format based on data that was so popular it even inspired a dedicated television show.
The conditions were ripe for a data revolution. This transformation was not pioneered by an enlightened coach, but by a management consultancy group called Opta Consulting, formed by ex-directors of Coopers Lybrand, which itself would eventually merge with Price Waterhouse to become PwC.
Opta’s sales and marketing executive Suzi Russell sought to replicate Coopers Lybrand’s cricket ratings system for soccer, believing it would provide a valuable shop window for Opta’s services. She enlisted the support of the Premier League and its television partner Sky Sports, as well as former Arsenal and England assistant manager Don Howe, who helped develop the method behind the Opta Index.
Data was collected manually from match footage usually sent to referees to assess their performance, with analysts spending up to six hours logging event data, such as goals scored, scorers, cards and corners. Data entry was painstaking, tapes were sent physically, and calculations were made using a single computer that worked overnight.
The result was a ‘Game Score’ for each player that was used in Sky’s Monday Night Football programme and The Observer newspaper. The score was largely meaningless, but the underlying data was attracting interest from fans and newspapers – partly because it was interesting to fantasy soccer players and partly because it was free copy that filled column inches.
What started out as a marketing exercise took on a life of its own. Within three months, Opta became an independent company, secured sponsorship from Carling and was appointed the official player performance statistician of the Premier League. Its client base expanded to include the majority national newspapers, sports broadcasters, popular websites, magazines, matchday programmes, fantasy soccer games and betting firms.
Early data was painstakingly recorded by manual methods (Image credit: Stats Perform)
The evolution of Opta
Ownership of Opta changed hands on multiple occasions over the next decade and a half. Sport Internet Group, which owned an array of websites including Football365, bought the business in 1999 before itself being acquired by Sky at the peak of the dotcom boom. By 2002, Opta was in the hands of Aiden Cooney’s Sportingstatz before Perform Group made a UK£40 million swoop in 2013.
By this point, Opta had firmly established itself at the forefront of statistical innovation in soccer, expanding into new leagues and new sports, while also refining its processes. Multiple analysts were sent to cover a single game and computerised logging meant it was able to offer real-time data from 2006, making it more immediately usable for coaches and broadcasters.
Computer vision technology helped automate the collection of data and acquire previously uncapturable information such as the exact position of all 22 players and the ball. When combined with more sophisticated models, it was possible to transform raw data into more meaningful insights that could be acted upon by teams and explain trends on the pitch.
Expected Goals (xG), for example, aims to quantify the quality of attacking opportunities more effectively than shots taken, which treats a six-yard attempt in front of an empty goal equally to a 30-yard speculative effort.
As Opta’s operations became increasingly sophisticated and multifaceted, data became more accepted within the sport. Premier League clubs started employing performance analysts, insights were integrated into broadcasts, and there was an increasing appetite for data-led content among fans, aided by a community of amateur analysts and bloggers.
Analytics was no longer a fringe movement, but integral to how soccer was consumed by millions of people.
Patrick Lucey, chief scientist at Stats Perform, says the prevalence of statistics in video games and the greater availability of match video has helped aid data literacy and demand for insights, with Moneyball popularising the concept of analytics in sport beyond a handful of baseball enthusiasts.
“Stories like Moneyball changed the perception around analytics,” Lucey tells SportsPro. “But I think it’s really because of fan engagement and the media with things like xG. Sport is the world’s one shared experience. Billions of people love the game and have very detailed questions.
“When I watched the Premier League in the late 1990s and 2000s, often one of the key half-time stats would be total number of yellow cards or number of corners. I used to do a lot of scouting when I played, and I knew there was so much more. It’s about formation and player roles. It’s not just about the number of shots – it’s about quality, not quantity.”
3 – Cabo Verde is the first team to advance from the group stage of a FIFA World Cup with three draws since Chile in 1998.
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) June 27, 2026
Margins. pic.twitter.com/7hbQHJkoZ6
Intelligent analysis
The next stage in this evolution is artificial intelligence (AI), which has the potential to unlock new possibilities in both content and performance, aided by advances in cloud computing, object recognition and algorithm development which have all made it possible to collect, process and analyse vast amounts of data quicker than ever before.
Technological capability is now matched by consumer demand. The last men’s World Cup in Qatar four years ago coincided with the launch of ChatGPT, a tool which catapulted AI into the mainstream and transformed how many people access information by popularising prompt-based interactions.
Although that World Cup came too soon for ChatGPT to have a meaningful impact, it is now used by many sports fans as a source of information. Laura Harvey, coach of National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team Seattle Reign, even admitted using it for tactical analysis ahead of an upcoming fixture.
However, Lucey says tools like ChatGPT lack the necessary data for it to be useful in a professional setting. Large language models (LLMs) are only as useful as the data that trains them, and tools like ChatGPT are largely trained on the public internet rather than proprietary data.
Stats Perform, which was created by the merger of US sports data specialist Stats and Perform Group in 2019, says it is creating a sports tech, data and content platform ready for the AI-era of analysis – powered by Opta’s proprietary data.
By marrying this vast historic database of the sport with its LLMs, Stats Perform says it can offer more accurate, insightful responses for coaches, broadcasters and even fans who can interact with its tools using everyday language.
“AI and sport is not a new thing,” Lucey says. “But what’s happened recently is that ChatGPT has changed people’s experience and expectations of data. They want it to be conversational.
“The problem is ChatGPT, [Google] Gemini, etc. don’t have access to the deep data and they get hallucinations. What we see is the next wave of AI using proprietary enterprise data to answer those questions or create content and really work up the stack.
“Sport has its own language. It’s like the medical field in that [this data] doesn’t exist in existing texts. It’s all in electronic health records, vital signs and other [proprietary metrics]. Sport is the same, and we capture that data.”
The BBC has used Opta data extensively across its soccer coverage, including at Uefa Euro 2024 (Image credit: Stats Perform/BBC)
AI in action
Opta’s AI graphical, insight and tracking tools have already found their way into brand campaigns, broadcasts and coaching applications. Stats Perform has also launched Opta Pulse, which combines AI highlight generation and distribution with data-driven content.
At Uefa Euro 2024, the BBC used AI-driven metrics to enhance its coverage across multiple channels, including live broadcasts, studio shows, online articles, social content and more. This enhanced the quality of its coverage, drove conversation across multiple channels, and helped provide immediate, meaningful context.
Meanwhile, Vodafone used Stats Perform’s software to transform a basic live text commentary feature into an engaging, visual offering which served as a magnet for German soccer fans.
At the 2026 World Cup, the BBC plans to use AI not just to enhance its broadcast coverage but also to create content that acknowledges that not everyone will watch every match live. This is partly through choice, reflecting changing consumption habits, but also because the time difference between North America and the rest of the world means it is impossible. Not to mention that the expanded tournament will create an unprecedented 104-match schedule, some of which will be played simultaneously.
Opta is celebrating its 30th birthday with a commemorative ball bearing key stats from its history (Image credit: Stats Perform)
The agentic future
Looking ahead to future tournaments, the real innovation will likely be found in agentic AI, which can understand queries and break them down into multiple tasks, meaning it can take autonomous actions such as writing code.
“You can ask [agentic AI] detailed questions, and you can automate a lot,” Lucey explains. “That’s very useful when creating a report, a graphic or a video highlight. It’s huge for sport, which is live and you don’t have time to think. It’s crucial that we are able to push out live information, whether it’s via broadcasters, live score apps or bookmakers.
“Agentic AI is going to enable us to do things that we’ve always wanted to do. Instead of just creating a dashboard of information, you’ll be able to run long-term simulations. You’ll be able to find out what happens to the outcome of the season, not just the match, if you take out a couple of players.
“You’re not limited by resource. The sky is the limit but the barrier to entry is that you need to know what the techniques are, that the data is accurate and that the models are robust.”
While the 2026 World Cup might be too soon for agentic AI, it will likely be remembered as the moment that soccer’s global showpiece entered the AI era, establishing a foundation for future innovation. So, it seems only appropriate that the company that helped start it all should be involved.
Not bad for what was once a marketing exercise.
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