Stats Perform (formerly STATS, LLC and STATS, Inc.) is a sports data and analytics company formed through the combination of Stats and Perform. The company is involved in sports data collection and predictive analysis for use across various sports sectors including professional team performance, digital, media, broadcast and betting. The company has also been increasingly involved in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. Its clients include media outlets, sports leagues and teams,

fantasy sports A fantasy sport (also known less commonly as rotisserie or roto) is a game, often played using the Internet, where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams composed of proxies of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete bas ...

and

sports betting Sports betting is the activity of predicting sports results and placing a wager on the outcome. The frequency of sports bet upon varies by culture, with the vast majority of bets being placed on association football, American football, basket ...

services. As of 2014, the company covered 83,000 events annually from over 300 leagues and competitions. Stats Perform is headquartered in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

with other office locations in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Limerick Limerick ( ; ga, Luimneach ) is a western city in Ireland situated within County Limerick. It is in the province of Munster and is located in the Mid-West which comprises part of the Southern Region. With a population of 94,192 at the 2016 ...

, Aveiro,

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

Castelfranco Veneto Castelfranco Veneto ( vec, Casteło) is a town and '' comune'' of Veneto, northern Italy, in the province of Treviso, by rail from the town of Treviso. It is approximately inland from Venice. History The town originates from a castle built he ...

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

Bangalore Bangalore (), List of renamed places in India, officially Bengaluru (), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan area, metropolitan population of a ...

Chennai Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...

, Dusseldorf, Graz,

Istanbul ) , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = 34000 to 34990 , area_code = +90 212 (European side) +90 216 (Asian side) , registration_plate = 34 , blank_name_sec2 = GeoTLD , blank_i ...

, Katowice,

Kuala Lampur , anthem = '' Maju dan Sejahtera'' , image_map = , map_caption = , pushpin_map = Malaysia#Southeast Asia#Asia , pushpin_map_caption = , coordinates = , su ...

Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the Largest cities of the Europ ...

Nice Nice ( , ; Niçard dialect, Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes departments of France, department in France. The Nice urban unit, agg ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and List of cities in the Czech Republic, largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 milli ...

Sao Paulo SAO or Sao may refer to: Places * Sao civilisation, in Middle Africa from 6th century BC to 16th century AD * Sao, a town in Boussé Department, Burkina Faso * Saco Transportation Center (station code SAO), a train station in Saco, Maine, U ...

, and Sydney. In addition to their offices, Stats Perform have full time staff all over the globe operating in local markets including

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

Dubai Dubai (, ; ar, دبي, translit=Dubayy, , ) is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the capital of the Emirate of Dubai, the most populated of the 7 emirates of the United Arab Emirates.The Government and Politics of ...

Seoul Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 of ...

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

, and more.

History

STATS, Inc. was founded in April 1981STATS website: Timeline
/ref> by John Dewan, who became the company's CEO. The company name is an acronym for "Sports Team Analysis and Tracking Systems". STATS was an outgrowth of the grassroots non-profit Project Scoresheet, a volunteer network created to collect baseball statistics. Perform Group was originally formed in 2007 via the merger of Premium TV Limited and Inform Group. It was originally involved in content distribution, subscription, advertising and sponsorship, and technology and production. In 2013,

Perform Group DAZN Group Limited (formerly Perform Group) is a British sports media company owned by Access Industries. Its flagship property is DAZN, a global sports subscription streaming platform. It also owns a significant minority stake in the leading f ...

acquired

Opta Sports Opta Sports, formerly Opta Sportsdata, is a British sports analytics company. Opta provides data for 30 sports in 70 countries, with clients ranging from leagues to broadcasters and betting websites. The company was founded in 1996, and acquire ...

. Opta was founded in 1996 and remains part of Stats Perform. In 2019, Stats merged with Perform Content following its sale to parent company Vista Equity Partners.

Vista Equity Partners ownership, merger with Perform Content

In June 2014, Fox Sports and the AP sold STATS LLC to

Vista Equity Partners Vista Equity Partners is an American investment firm focused on financing and forwarding software, data, and technology-enabled startup businesses. Vista has invested in hundreds of companies, including Misys, Ping Identity, and Marketo. The ...

, a private equity firm. In early 2015, STATS acquired the wire services

The Sports Network The Sports Network (TSN) is a Canadian English language sports specialty channel established by the Labatt Brewing Company in 1984 as part of the first group of Canadian specialty cable channels. Since 2001, it has been majority-owned by comm ...

and Prozone. Vista Equity Partners also acquired

Automated Insights Automated Insights ("Ai") is an American-based technology company that specializes in natural language generation (NLG) software that turns big data into readable narratives. Automated Insights produced 300 million pieces of content in 2013, wh ...

, a company involved in using

natural-language generation Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. In one of the most widely-cited survey of NLG methods, NLG is characterized as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics th ...

based on big data (including in particular, generating wire reports on sporting events from raw statistics). In April 2019, Vista Equity Partners announced its intent to acquire Perform Content, the former sports data subsidiary of

. The company was selling the property to focus more on its sports streaming service

DAZN DAZN ( "da zone") is a global sports entertainment platform. Different to traditional linear and satellite broadcasting, DAZN is an over-the-top (OTT) streaming service meaning that it is delivered directly to viewers via the internet. The ...

. It was stated that

DAZN Group DAZN Group Limited (formerly Perform Group) is a British sports media company owned by Access Industries. Its flagship property is DAZN, a global sports subscription streaming platform. It also owns a significant minority stake in the leading f ...

would retain a "significant minority stake" in the surviving entity, which was to focus strongly on the use of

and

. On July 15, 2019, it was announced that the merged company would be known as Stats Perform, and operate under STATS CEO Carl Mergele. He stated that the company would " arnessthe power of immense amounts of sports data with unparalleled AI technology".

Partnerships with leagues and Federations

Over its history, Stats Perform has built several long-term partnerships with global sports leagues and federations to collect and commercialise sports data. These include Premier League, WTA,

FIBA The International Basketball Federation (FIBA ; French: ) is an association of national organizations which governs the sport of basketball worldwide. Originally known as the (hence FIBA), in 1989 it dropped the word ''amateur'' from its nam ...

La Liga The Campeonato Nacional de Liga de Primera División, commonly known simply as Primera División in Spain, and as La Liga in English-speaking countries and officially as LaLiga Santander for sponsorship reasons, stylized as LaLiga, is the men' ...

and

AELTC The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, also known as the All England Club, based at Church Road, Wimbledon, London, England, is a private members' club. It is best known as the venue for the Wimbledon Championships, the only Grand Slam ...

. As well as commercial services, Stats Perform also provides integrity services to major leagues to help in the prevention, detection and response to match manipulation.

Services Offered

Stats Perform divides it's services over four markets; Media, Big Tech, Professional Teams and Betting Operators. Media – The company services the digital media market through its PressBox platform. PressBox is a series of content creation tools which are designed to drive fan activations and engagement. Big Tech – The company works with the vast majority of major technology companies globally, providing them with Opta data feeds, advanced metrics and predictive analytics. Professional Teams – Through their Pro services, Stats Perform works with sports teams to enhance performance across recruitment, match analysis and strategic planning. Betting and Gaming – Their Bet services include live streams, ultra-fast data and detailed player data.

Opta

Opta Index Limited was founded in 1996 to analyse

Premier League The Premier League (legal name: The Football Association Premier League Limited) is the highest level of the men's English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Fo ...

football matches and was contracted by

Sky Sports Sky Sports is a group of British subscription sports channels operated by the satellite pay television company Sky Group (a division of Comcast), and is the dominant subscription television sports brand in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It ...

for their television broadcasts of the 1996–97 season. The following season, Opta became the official statistics provider for the league itself and became sponsored by Carling. The company was sold to

in 2013 for £40 million and remains part of Stats Perform.

Importance of Artificial Intelligence

When the merger of the two organisations was announced, CEO Carl Mergele pointed to the importance of AI technology in the future of sports and sports media. Since that point, the organisation has continued to invest in technologies, patents and models in the AI area. As a result, they've been able to deliver a series of products and services from player tracking and content creation to personalisation and predictive analytics.

References

External links

* {{official website, statsperform.com Sports records and statistics Former News Corporation subsidiaries Companies based in Chicago American companies established in 1981 Sports mass media in the United States Data companies