Data crunch: Why sportsbook operators could be caught between a rock and a hard place at the start of the football season
Operators could be faced with in-play outages when the new football season kicks off in less than two weeks
Betfred last week inked a five-year trading partnership with Betgenius that will see the operator use official data and Betgenius live pricing for all 4,200 English and Scottish league football matches from this season.
The deal itself was somewhat unremarkable, with Betfred a longstanding Betgenius client, but it was announced for a very specific reason: Betfred was the first operator to publically sign up to the Betgenius data offering since the provider secured the exclusive rights to the official football league rights.
The deal – thought to be worth some £20m a year- is also causing headaches for sportsbook operators which worry they could lose in-play pricing for major UK football if they don’t sign up for the Genius offering.
“This is a top-five concern for just about every sportsbook exec in the country at the moment,” says David Lampitt, managing director of sports partnerships at Sportradar.
Perform has been the official distributor for Football DataCo (FDC) data since 2013 but when the tender came up for renewal last year, Betgenius swooped in to secure the official rights exclusively, warning of a clampdown on other scouts and working with stadium security to physically remove them from grounds around the country.
In an op-ed for EGR, Genius Sports CEO Mark Locke criticised the widespread “theft of live sports data and infringement of IP rights” across the industry.
“It is hard to imagine another industry of our scale where the supply chain is dominated by stolen or misappropriated property,” he added.
In other words, if Genius and FDC see scouts from Perform or Sportradar in football stadiums this year, they will be removed and operators relying on those feeds could be in real trouble.
“I understand why they’ve done it, “Lampitt says. “As a smaller provider they needed to do something aggressive to take market share but it’s bad for the industry and for the long-term interests of sports and bookmakers if they do it through unlawful information monopolies that limit choice and increase costs rather than through open competition.”
Supply and demand
Lampitt believes the data supply market should be open for competition, with the option for what he calls open-source data (unofficial data to you or I) and let the market decide whether it’s worth paying more for a faster feed.
“We are confident in our legal position under UK competition law and will continue to supply a data feed on UK football that is legitimately sourced,” Lampitt says. “And we will push back against any deal that is anti-competitive and seeks to exclude or restrict the ability to build a competitive data supply of live data”.
In other words, Genius rivals will continue sending scouts to stadiums, come what may.
David Lampitt
Genius could sub-licence the official data to Perform and Radar, but has been reportedly slow-playing negotiations to ramp up the pressure on its rivals and the bookmakers in the run-up to the new season.
Perform is arguably under more pressure as the incumbent which has deals for the use of this data with most tier-one operators, but the firm has stayed quiet thus far, not responding to an EGR request for comment for this article. Genius also declined to comment.
“The clock is ticking down fast to the start of the season, we’re still waiting for substantive responses from Betgenius to our requests for a sub-licence and so have had to make alternative arrangements,” Lampitt says. One source likened the countdown to a balloon slowly filling up with water.
Both Perform and Radar will use TV pictures where possible but there will be around 3,000 UK games out of 4,200 this season that will not be on TV or streamed, so scouts will need to be sent.
The obvious culmination of this brewing battle is court. Genius and FDC could potentially take its rivals to court for breaching ticket conditions, while Perform and Radar could feasibly do the same, arguing that competition law overrides ticket terms and their scouts are legally allowed to be there.
In the meantime, providers and their operator partners have to sweat, and the solution as it stands is unclear. The 2019-20 EFL season kicks off over the weekend of August 2-4 and its’s very possible operators lose in-play markets early in the season. If so the pressure will be ramped up on the providers to work out a solution before the industry starts losing too much money.
Let’s hope they come to an agreement before the balloon bursts.