It's all about innovation
The direct route will take you straight to the heart of how the game unfolded – who scored and how many?
But Opta also digs deeper than that, collecting the data that enables sports professionals, the media and the fans to analyse for themselves why the winners won and whether they are likely to repeat their success next time.
Whether your sport is football, cricket or either rugby code, Opta’s innovative approach can shed new light on the action and the outcome.
The same goes for Formula One, golf, tennis plus a range of other sports that are in development.
Opta looks at every event from top to bottom, inside out and then looks again. Our analysts are driven by a passion for sport and a commitment to the innovative approach that leaves no secrets untold.
Recruiting the best people
With customers across the continent, Opta is Europe’s largest provider of football data. But we’re also very good at the other major sports, and as we find out more about the needs of our customers we are adding to the events we can offer.
We start by recruiting the best people, and our training makes them even better.
Our analysts bring unrivalled knowledge of the sports they cover and they have what it takes to keep calm under pressure, maintaining accuracy and timeliness in the live environment and taking the most meticulous approach to the collection of finer detail from post-match analysis.
That’s important because in big sporting events it’s the fine detail that makes the difference between victory and defeat, and we want to make sure our customers are winners.
Bringing data to life
We believe data and statistics should be part of the fabric of any sport, so we don’t leave anything to chance.
Whatever the event we commit the resources required to ensure the key data is captured in real-time, because sports fans demand instant updates.
Then we go through the action again, digging out the detail that makes the difference between simply knowing what happened in a sports event and understanding why.
The outcome is the most comprehensive collection of data from every event that Opta covers. It adds up to a lot of valuable information, but it’s what we do with it that is the clever part.
An unswerving focus on quality
Opta’s database doesn’t just store the content we collect from matches and races.
It manages and manipulates the data, enabling us to extract everything we need to tell the story of why a sports event unfolded in the way it did and to help people predict what might happen in the future.
We have a dedicated resource of “data champions” whose sole focus is to interrogate the database, analyse what we collect and find new and innovative ways to deliver and display the most compelling content.
So it’s not about 90 minutes of football, 80 minutes of rugby, one, four or five days of cricket. It’s a 24/7 commitment to bringing data to life.
Finding beauty in the detail
Our robust systems and validation procedures ensure the accuracy of all the content that emerges from our database.
Opta’s innovative approach, coupled with our close relationship with sport’s administrators and audiences, ensure we present that content in a style that is both compelling and easy to understand.
We know that statistics displayed in tables only tell part of the story so we pull them around, find the figures that matter the most and package them into eye-catching graphics - simple designs that make a big impact in print, web, mobile and broadcast products.
Any consumer of major sport information via mainstream media organisations will be familiar with the Opta approach. Our data will tell you what made the difference in a sporting event, and our presentation will show you why.
At the heart of sport
If data is all a customer wants then that’s what they can have, in a feed and format that meets their requirements.
But everyone at Opta recognises that technology is always moving on and time is always at a premium, so we are constantly working on new ideas that will make life easier for our customers.
Live feeds enable the fastest publication and can be tailored to meet a customer’s specific needs whether their output is a broadcaster’s videprinter, a mobile operator’s alerts service or a website for a bookmaker or media organisation.
The same updates can also be supplied to maintain customer databases, maybe complete with a query tool that enables our clients and even their customers to carryout their own research.
The more detailed analysis kicks in with the event preview feeds, the static or interactive graphics delivered ready for publication in print and web, the player profiles that can help a club prepare for a big match or a big-money transfer deal - all available in the range of languages you would expect from our established multinational sports media operation.