Recently I published a list of my top young prospects from the English Premier League’s 2014-15 season on the OptaPro blog. As I wrote there, the idea of the list was to cast a broad net, so that players of great potential would be identified as early as possible. This approach works well for clubs that can afford one or two false positives – supposed stars who turn out to be duds. But what about clubs that can’t afford to make a mistake? No model is absolutely foolproof, but I thought it would be interesting to look at a slightly…
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What changes will the Premier League television deal bring?
By now everyone knows that the English Premier League has signed a blockbuster deal for broadcasting rights in the United Kingdom. The pact with Sky and BT will bring the 20 lucky clubs about £1.7 billion annually for three years starting after next season. It’s a huge sum – more than any other league earns – and an increase of more than 70 percent over the last three-year package. It’s also a windfall, since the clubs don’t have to change their operations or incur additional costs in order to get it. So where will all that money go, and how…
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Real Madrid takes on Big Data – and crowdsourced analytics?
Tomorrow Real Madrid and Microsoft will launch a new app to connect fans to the club and to each other. The app will offer extra content during matches, including video from multiple camera angles, as well as games and competitions for users. But it will also give fans access to about 250 series of match data in real time… and that’s what caught my eye. Today I asked José Ángel Sánchez, the club’s director-general, and Orlando Ayala of Microsoft just how they were going to make all that information available. For example, would fans be able to download the data…
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