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Shkruar nga Alessandro Cappelli
Monetizing betting data is the new reality for FIFA...
FIFA has increasingly close commercial ties with the world of sports betting. Last week, world football’s governing body signed a four-year deal with Stats Perform, the group that also controls Opta, a leading football statistics company. The deal gives Stats Perform exclusive rights to provide official data and live betting coverage for all major FIFA competitions, including the 2026 Men’s World Cup and the 2027 Women’s World Cup. The data will be produced by Opta’s team and distributed to licensed betting operators.
Eight days after the partnership was announced, the website Football Reference (often abbreviated as FBref) announced that it would no longer have access to Stats Perform's statistics. FBref is a free and open source football statistics portal: without Opta's database, the site remains online, but stripped of its core functionality - only the basic data is available, all advanced statistics data has disappeared.
The decision stripped FBref of its historical archive, depriving scouts, smaller clubs and content creators of all sorts of vast amounts of data that had fueled football analysis and debate for years. With the site effectively closed, a decade of statistics was wiped out.
The two news stories, the FIFA-Stats Perform deal and the FBref shutdown, are closely linked. The decision to remove the site's data was interpreted by many analysts as part of a centralization strategy: transforming statistics that had been accessible for years into an exclusive asset, designed primarily for the betting market.
It's a stance in line with Gianni Infantino's FIFA, which is increasingly focused on monetizing data and content, rather than considering it as a shared asset of the football community. After all, the FIFA president is the same one who, just over a month ago, organized a huge global circus to award Donald Trump a Peace Prize: the two only know transactional language and understand each other perfectly.
FBref was not just a statistics site. It was a knowledge infrastructure, an analysis tool accessible to anyone. It allowed you to work on shot maps, expected goals, key passes and historical comparisons between different leagues. It was the Bible for those who studied football for work or pleasure. University researchers, independent analysts and clubs with limited budgets were deprived of an essential tool for analysis, observation and comparative studies between different competitions.
There are other free or low-cost statistical platforms available online, such as WhoScored, SofaScore or Understat. They provide useful data, but they are based on reconstructions, estimates or aggregations, not direct access to the original Opta databases. Therefore, they are not a real alternative for advanced club-specific or betting market research.
Then there are the premium providers (Opta, StatsBomb, Wyscout, Second Spectrum) that collect specific data and advanced metrics. These repositories have strict licenses and extremely high costs, and therefore also have very select clients: in most cases, they are high-level professional clubs, federations and betting organizers.
FBref was halfway between the two categories. Thanks to the Opta database, anyone could verify, compare, analyze and build new tactical narratives. Those who lose the most are the independent analysts who compile reports, observe and provide content for smaller media outlets or sports agencies; the semi-professionals who will have limited information; the clubs in the lower leagues and the very small federations with limited budgets. Inevitably, this is also a loss for data-driven sports journalism, which now depends on expensive or incomplete sources.
Finally, all the enthusiasts and fans who want to deepen their knowledge of the game have lost a lot. Among them, some have used FBref to study, conduct research and analysis, produce content, and get noticed.
More than anything else, Football Reference was a tool for disseminating knowledge about football. It allowed anyone to study the game in detail, leading to a qualitative leap in understanding a sport that could be analyzed on different levels.
Last week, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched an investigation into FIFA’s partnership with Stats Perform, assessing possible breaches of broadcasting protections and ethical obligations. As far as we know now, FIFA’s commercial partnership with the gambling industry is not necessarily illegal; it is likely to be somewhere in a legal grey area. But it certainly falls foul of the federation’s code of ethics, which formally prohibits players, officials and agents from participating “directly or indirectly in betting, gambling, lotteries or similar events or transactions in connection with football matches or competitions.”
Monetizing data through betting is the new reality for FIFA, which now aims to squeeze wealth out of everything. The same pattern was seen in the split with EA Sports, due to the video game company’s multibillion-dollar demands for the naming rights to the world’s most popular soccer video game. And then again, in the progressive migration of player tracking data to the private FIFA Player app and the freemium FIFA+ model. Data that was once widely accessible and widely shared is now locked behind paywalls and expensive licenses, often inaccessible to those outside the professional industry or the betting world.
Infantino's FIFA does not behave like an organization that brings football everywhere, that spreads knowledge and the culture of the game. It behaves like a profit-making company, capable of making money from every statistic, every data, every approach to football culture, even when this means excluding the global community of fans, scholars and small clubs./ Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "Linkiesta"
Qe me President Zhoa Havelanzh FIFA e ka humbur autoritetin e saj serioz, te respektuar, te pavarur, e jo korruptiv. Ish Presidenti Blater apo edhe Infatino nuk e mbajten kete organizate ne nivelin e Havelanzh. Keta te fundit here shikoheshin me sheike e here me diktatore e delirante. Presidenti i FIFA-s duhet te jete serioz dhe i prere, tu tregojn vendin ketyre tipave dhe te fokusohet per rritjen e nivelin te kombetareve dhe kompeticioneve.