Patrick Mostboeck
Sportradar SVP for fan engagement
David Lampitt
Tennis Data Innovations CEO
Adam Pennock
Sportradar VP for risk and investigations
Rainer Lichtmannegger
Sportradar SVP for sports content and products
Wearing whites on manicured lawns under the rain of the English summer makes the Wimbledon Championships a central part of tennis heritage. But what about its future, and that of sport in general?
Because innovation is adopted and absorbed so fast, it can often feel like a mere process of evolution, but in fact, the fan experience is going through a revolution, with tennis at the forefront.
In the digital era, watching sports has become more interactive. Sports technology lies behind this shift: actionable, data-backed products and services that power the entire sports industry.
It informs every broadcast and stream a fan watches. It’s inside every bet they make and keeps those bets safe from corruption. It also influences a huge amount of the social-media content fans read – even the in-game tactical decisions players and coaches make.
Sports technology is what puts the fundamental in the fun of sport.
Sophistication
Analysis of the raw data that sports produce is performed across varying levels of sophistication. Level one is the scheduling and scoring data. Level two is automated tracking data, which uses machine-learning models to understand the live action. In tennis, that might consist of shot types, winners and errors, rally lengths and so on.
Level three is the deeper tracking data that keeps a close eye on both the player and the ball. That involves instantly plotting the position of each player and the ball on the playing surface — imagine it as a mappable grid with the ball height also marked at fractions-of-a-second accuracy.
“When we started, we only had some of the data on some of the courts, some of the time,” said David Lampitt, chief executive of Tennis Data Innovations, the subsidiary of the ATP men’s tennis tour responsible for managing and commercialising its data.
“So, we created a whole footprint, not only across the main ATP tour – the top 60 or so tournaments – but we’ve also done that across the Challenger tour, the approximately 250 tournaments below that. It’s a big tech deployment, but it’s been transformative for us in terms of what we’re able to create and what we’re able to deliver to Sportradar as our partner.”
Through data, sports can also reach new potential fans, explaining the game in terms specifically tailored to their understanding – and in any language. Earlier this year, the ATP announced its partnership with Infosys to launch Ally, an AI-powered chatbot delivering real-time insights.
Engagement
The pace and quality of data capture are fast improving through the increased resolution of camera technology, better processing speeds through GPUs and generative AI. These advancements have come all at once, and together, they’ve enhanced the standard of computer vision around sports, presenting a growth opportunity to tap into new fan trends.
“AI and Gen AI give us a whole new dimension of what is possible,” said Patrick Mostboeck, SVP for fan engagement. “Consumption patterns have shifted from watching two, three hours in a row to much shorter engagements – not even a like or a click but just a scroll over something. We feed this into our product development.”
Automated clips and highlights are being delivered almost instantly and consumed at an increasing scale. Virtualised content, with animated players and playing spaces, also provides the fan with more choice over their viewing experience through custom viewing angles and AI-generated commentary. Products like Sportradar’s 4Sight Streaming embed 3D-animated overlays with stats and insights directly into the match broadcast.
And with better information at their fingertips through live-action visualisations, fans naturally feel more equipped to deepen their attachment to a match through the betting markets. To this end, new “micromarkets” are offering more narrative-based opportunities based on the more granular feedback sportsbook operators are receiving from the live action.
For example, in tennis, that might mean betting on whether the point will end straight after the return. Will the winner be a forehand, backhand or volley? How many shots will the next rally last? Thanks to real-time data, in-play markets now account for 90 per cent of all tennis betting.
“We partner with sports leagues and federations, including Wimbledon, Roland-Garros and the US Open, to collect data, refine it and build products with that data,” said Rainer Lichtmannegger, SVP for sports content and products. “Overall, tennis is the ‘perfect’ live-betting sport. It serves the client base that prefers competitor-versus-competitor sports over team sports.
“Tennis is a point-by-point sport, and the models can predict probabilities for everyone, so it’s always on for betting.”
In the past, tennis’s fast score resolution has made it unsuitable for the ‘betbuilder’ markets – where multiple selections are taken at once – that have become highly popular in other sports. But innovative approaches to creating narratives from the wealth of new data mean that opportunity will now grow in tennis too.
“If you get a pre-built proposition, then it will be easy to back the story of how the next game will evolve”, added Lichtmannegger. “For example, for a player to win their service game, having more than one ace and the longest rally in the game being seven shots or more. These kinds of bets are becoming possible, and I think they will be popular with the tennis community.”
Because the data are so fast and reliable, technology is now also being used in officiating. Line judges have been retired across the ATP, with the only human official now the umpire. Tracking technology now relays an audio file to the court.
Sports technology lies behind this shift: actionable, data-backed products
and services that power the entire sports industry
Enhanced
Sports technology companies can now shift from reactive to predictive data, augmented by wearables that capture player data. That player data is being used for performance tracking in matches and training, assisting athletes with coaching, injury resilience and wellbeing.
When combined and triangulated, data deliver immense accuracy to predictions, helping to protect athletes and defend sports-betting markets from corruption. For instance, data drawn from live action and real-time betting tickets are the base layer for Sportradar’s Universal Fraud Detection System AI bet-monitoring tool that scans markets for suspicious activity to protect against match-fixing.
And great strides are being made to protect the athletes themselves, too. Sportspeople are public figures, and many of them have a substantial online presence that reflects that, leaving them wide open to abuse. The company’s Integrity Services team reports that 6.5% of all online comments made to athlete accounts it reviewed were classified as abusive or threatening.
“Some players receive over 5,000 abusive comments – and some have experienced many more, with up to 70 % of all comments they’ve seen across a nearly two-year period being abusive,” said Adam Pennock, VP for risk and investigations. He explains that, although abusive accounts are anonymous, users’ digital footprints can be tracked.
“We seek to identify the repeat offenders responsible for a disproportionate amount of the abuse, link the profiles, build the intelligence profiles and work with law enforcement to be able to take action against them.”
Data are the microscopic atoms of the digital world, whether in sports or otherwise. And with every improvement in fans’ understanding of what the data are and what they say, everything becomes a little less unpredictable – even in sport, the greatest unscripted narrative of all.
