“We never like to use the word monopoly, it doesn’t go down well,” the head of Sony Sports, Rufus Hack, tells City AM when asked about his firm’s impressive market share across tech in sport.
Sony last week purchased a majority stake in StatSports, the performance-tracking firm which counts Harry Kane among its investors, in a move which saw the platform join officiating powerhouse Hawk-Eye, software provider Pulselive, data visualisation company Beyond Sports and motion capture business KinaTrax under the Sony Sports umbrella.
Sony consolidation
“We’ve got a pretty high market share in officiating,” Hack says. “We do think it’s a positive thing for the sports industry to have consolidation.
“The last thing you want, as an analyst at Arsenal or the the LA Dodgers, is to have five different data sets coming in from training and matchday, telling you different things – you just want to have everything clean, and then you want someone who can unlock the insights from that so you can do your job.”
Sony Sports now works with 23 of the top 25 global sports leagues, including “the NBA, the NHL, NFL, MLB, Fifa, ICC, World Rugby” and more, Hack says. And the ability to track data, gather data points – into the billions – and create a “holistic view of the data landscape” is only going to become more important.
Fans are demanding more data when they’re watching sport, and they want the use of technology in sport to be 100 per cent accurate, 100 per cent of the time. Tough ask.
Shifting industry
Hack says their Hawk-Eye business has been introduced into the NFL and MLB for a variety of uses, while they’re working with the NBA on automated goaltending detection and court boundaries. But the future is set to be a different place for tech and sport.
“We’re probably seeing a once-in-a-generation shift in the sports industry and how content is being consumed,” he says.
“Sport has been incredibly lucky over the last 20 years to ride the wave of B2B media rights fees. And in some instances, that’s starting to tail off.
“We firmly believe that there is going to be more participative sports content in the future, particularly leveraging AI – we’ve been working with Cambridge University for the last two years to build this simulation engine using billions of historical data points, so you can simulate how games are going to play out.”
Hypothetically speaking…
So is there a world where Mikel Arteta – the Arsenal coach Hack met before buying StatSports – sacks an assistant coach and replaces it with a technology product from Sony?
“This technology is a tool in the toolbox and ultimately they still need interpretation,” Hack concludes. “They still need humans and people to make the right analysis and to use this with the other inputs that they’ve got, but hopefully it can be a really instructive instrument as they start to think about performance, transfers, scouting, team tactics, performance, load management, and injury prevention.”
It may not like the tag, but Sony’s consolidation in the sport tech and data space borders on a monopoly, but with that it is setting itself up to be the global leader in the sector going forward.
With its latest acquisition it has added a new data set to its arsenal, and one wouldn’t count on it stopping there.