Genius Sports to Continue Exclusive UK Football Data Collection

Sports data, content and technology firm, Genius Sports, announced an extension of its existing official data partnership with the data rights holder of UK football, Football DataCo.

Keeping UK Football Data Exclusivity

The terms of the agreement with Football DataCo will allow Genius Sports to continue serving as the exclusive official supplier of low-latency live data from the English Premier League (EPL), English Football League (EFL) and Scottish Professional Football Leagues (SPFL) for sports betting purposes.

“The Premier League is the most popular league in world sport and Genius Sports has created the fastest, most accurate and secure feed on UK football to power first-class products for sportsbooks around the world,” commented Genius Sports’ chief executive officer Mark Locke.

Delighted to see the key partnership extended, Locke outlined that Genius Sports would “continue to power innovation” alongside an expansion of its “suite of AI-powered Second Spectrum Tracking Data technology” into the EFL Championship.

The renewed partnership will allow Genius Sports to continue providing low-latency official data to regulated sports betting operators around the world throughout the 2024-25 season. The sports data company has been linking UK football with sportsbooks since the start of the 2019-20 season, covering more than 4,000 fixtures per season.

Expanding Second Spectrum’s Championship Coverage

The partnership has also been expanded to include the capturing of sub-second, skeletal tracking data for all Sky Bet EFL Championship and Championship Play-Off matches via Genius Sports’ best-in-class Second Spectrum technology.

“Genius Sports and Second Spectrum continue to generate first-class data and provide innovative solutions for a variety of Football DataCo’s stakeholders,” said the general manager of Football DataCo, Adrian Ford, pointing out that “the technology is improving all the time [and by] extending the creative use of data [will help] improve the presentation of English and Scottish football.”

The expansion will see the installation of Genius Sports’ AI-powered tracking systems across all Championship grounds where they are not present already, empowering Genius Sports to capture rich positional data on every player, match official and the ball.

Second Spectrum will also provide teams and coaches from the Championship with access to its software delivering player performance metrics derived from tracking data and indexed to match video, an access their EPL colleagues have since 2020.

Augmentation Enhances Viewer Experience

Optical on-pitch data, including shot velocity, player speed, positional data, and other team and player insights, empowers Second Spectrum’s augmentation technology to generate automated graphics in real time while offering viewers high personalization options by overlaying the graphics onto the live broadcasts.

The new agreement with Football DataCo comes hot on the heels of Genius Sports’ expanded collaboration with the German Football Association (DFB) to protect the integrity of football in the country and help the association prevent match-fixing.

Other major developments for the company in the past few months include the agreement with the Vietnam Pro Basketball League (VBA), a new collaboration with the European League of Football (ELF) that represents American football competitions outside of North America, as well as the launch of  CFL LiveStats.