“Data Could Bring Tennis Closer Together”

The huge growth of the sports data business over the past 10 years has largely been driven by the explosion of live sports betting. Now a new deal for commercializing data promises to unlock more value for one of the most popular sports for fans to bet on.

Globally, football is far and away number one for betting. Behind it are two other sports, basketball and tennis, each with about 10% of the market. In 2020, the ATP and ATP Media joined forces to set up Tennis Data Innovations (TDI) as an innovation-led company specifically tasked with maximizing the value of tennis data.

Only 10 years ago, revenues generated from official data across all sports would have struggled to surpass the $10 million mark. Now, the figure is pushing past $1 billion with companies like Genius Sports, Stats Perform, Infront, IMG Arena and Sportradar leading the market.

Sports data in and of itself has limited IP protections and is not protected by copyright, What is protectable is how the data is stored in databases and elaborated in creative ways. TDI’s business is focused on turning multiple layers of raw tennis data into products with unique benefits.

While viewers are familiar with the increased use of stats to enhance coverage of events on TV and digital, the majority of data-driven revenues in sport – sometimes in excess of 90% of overall data value – comes from the sports betting industry, as live data is an indispensable input into their businesses.

And the data they pay for tends to be extremely fast and highly accurate information about what happens on the field of play: scores and results and the key details of the sporting action. The betting companies then turn this data into probabilities (sometimes the work is outsourced) which enables them to work out the price of bets to offer to  their customers.

TDI is preparing to shift that model in a new long-term partnership with Sportradar starting in January. TDI will not only be producing all of the scoring and tracking data from ATP matches, but feeding it through its own data platform, simplifying the supply of data downstream for betting companies. In parallel Sportradar as the commercial distribution partner will be leveraging its capabilities across probabilities and pricing for deeper data sets than ever before in tennis, bringing innovative new solutions and providing a one-stop solution for betting operators. iSportConnect’s Jay Stuart spoke with Tennis Data Innovations’ CEO David Lampitt to know more.

“We know that tennis has been and remains a popular sport for betting and we want to make sure that we’re at the forefront of innovation in this space, harnessing technology and driving growth by delivering the best possible products in the sports ecosystem.” said TDI chief executive David Lampitt. “This new partnership will help us to do that.”

Making tennis a better product for betting companies can also by extension make it more commercially attractive for TV and media companies as its audiences are more engaged and tend to stay watching for longer.

TDI collects a range of data at ATP events through different technologies. Umpires are supplied with tablets loaded with proprietary software and they log what happens on court in real time. TDI also compiles a deeper level of in-play information from tracking technology partners such as Hawk-Eye or FlightScope. TDI uses machine learning algorithms to refine this into standardised data sets such as the type of shot a player hits or whether an error is forced or unforced.

At present this is only being done by TDI for ATP events. When it comes to data, the sport of tennis is as remarkably fragmented as it in other commercial areas. The seven main tennis bodies (ATP, WTA, ITF and the four Grand Slams) use multiple different data collection systems.

Even at a combined event shared by the ATP and WTA, such as the Masters events in Miami or Rome, where the men and women play on the same courts, the data collection systems are separate and get switched over between matches.

These inefficiencies and the growing capabilities of TDI could move the sport towards a more coordinated and consolidated commercial approach to data. “It’s understandable that the aggregation of media rights or sponsorship sales carry some specific challenges, but data is different,” Lampitt said. “The downstream market is different, the value proposition is different and the opportunity for real synergy is pretty unique. We are hoping that over the next five years we will see a move towards having a more consistent operational set-up for tennis data and TDI is uniquely positioned to help enable that.”

In the meantime, TDI is building links with a number of other sports as a data specialist that can help them develop a clear strategy for managing their data assets.

Lampitt said: “We hope that tennis will be seen as a leader in developing innovative models around its data assets and using them to captivate hundreds of millions of fans around the world.”