 Thank you very much, both of you, for joining us here. So, I've mentioned the fact that sport is a very traditional pastime. It dates back an awful long way. It's a very simple concept of one boy, one girl going out to throw a ball further, kick a ball harder, jump higher, run faster. But it is changing all the time. And we know within the room in general terms the breakneck pace that technology has been developing at. How has it been impacting upon the sporting world? I think the big thing that drives sport probably fast in most industries is that need to win or the will to win. And you know, there's a famous quote about, you know, the thing about sport is you play to win the game. And it's always been a numbers game. So, you know, you mentioned stats earlier, started in Billy Bean's Money Ball era. And the numbers has always been there, even it was pen and paper. So now the fact is actually it's just looking for, just ingest so much data just to give that win an edge. And marginal, you know, we look for that 1% is key there, I would say. So it's anything that'll give somebody a win an edge and technology is just driving that really hard. I remember speaking to the head of innovation with the US Olympic organization just after Rio in the 2016 games. And they had invested millions in terms of precisely that, the marginal gain, the 1%. We've seen it through Sky's cycling team as well, possibly slightly besmirched subsequently, but trying to find that extra, extra little bit. Has that changed sport? Well, no, because you look at the emotion of say the weekend, you know, with the Ryder Cup, or you look at any significant event. Nobody sees a sport actually in the event itself. That's all going on in the background. But it has changed, I think, the business of sport in the background with the strength and conditioning coaches, the analysts, the team that are in the background. I mean, I'm based in Limerick with the All Ireland win. There was more people in the background than there actually was players. So that's changed this business of sport. But from an engaging point of view, or if anything, it makes the competitiveness is greater now because the chances of winning are opened up, I think, due to information. Has it raised the game, Simon, in those terms? Because we've always loved sport and we've always liked the idea of team A, team B. Now, there is so much more behind us. Like when I was driving out here today, I was listening around the NFL, a podcast about American sport. And it's all about the number of first downs, the percentage of third down conversions that the teams were able to produce in an entertaining fashion. And I'd watched all of those games at the weekend on my mobile phone in a red zone program that was zeroing in on just all of those hot spots and those bright points. Does that mean that sport has become even more valuable in terms of how much we're willing to spend in terms of time, money and engagement? Certainly become a lot more visible through technology and no more so than in the last year. We've only got to think of the World Cup and football and just how much television content was on air. But more particularly how many times a day you could access it, whether you're in a pub, whether you're in a car, whether you're in front of the TV. My was brought up when sport was an appointment to view occasion on terrestrial TV. All of those rules have been changed by technology. It's on demand when you want it, how you want it. And data's driving that. Data's driving the story. It's helping tell the narrative of who's winning, who's better, marginal gains. It's also inviting money in through betting, through fantasy, through over-the-top media rights. So the whole model is being shifted dramatically, almost overnight, by data and technology. So I do think it is driving value, but we have to be careful that the technology doesn't become so advanced that you lose that emotional engagement with why you want to watch sport in the first place. So we've got to watch out for a bit of algorithm apathy, if you like, to ensure that it's still real and visceral and instant. In a sense, from an outsider's perspective, that's always been a challenge. I know in cricket, I came late to cricket, now I thoroughly enjoy it and Ireland is doing well on the world stage, getting up into test-playing status. But cricket was always with wisdom, the Almanacs. There was always, even before we knew what an algorithm was, we knew that numbers were very important in sport. Which of the sports, are there particular sports that might have actually grabbed a hold of this and are doing it better than others, do you think? Yeah, it's difficult to not think of the American sports in all honesty. NBA comes to mind as a sport that's really leading from the front and has done, for at least a decade, investing in performance data so that the teams and the players become more efficient and effective, but then using that data to help tell the story of what's unfolding on court. So I'd certainly hold out, the NBA is an example. Who would have thought you can now buy the final quarter for 99 cents of an NBA game? And that's all driven by understanding what fans want when they're available to see it and when the critical moments of competition occur, which are often in the final quarter. So I'd hold up the NBA. You mentioned cricket. I think cricket's been fantastic alongside broadcasters like Sky in embracing Hawkeye technology to help tell a pretty difficult story, you know, a five-day test match. How do you make that interesting? And so there's so much more for a commentator to talk about for a sponsor to get their teeth into and for a viewer at home to enjoy. And then the other one that comes to mind would be tennis. I mean, there's no shortage. Look at what IBM do, for example, with Wimbledon. They've got a slam tracker now where you can determine which player you like, which strategies you're interested in, and you can have privileged access to content that we at home on the sofa wouldn't see. So, you know, technology is driving a far more intimate relationship where we're in the driving seat on the sofa, where in the past it used to be all about the broadcast lens. Now it's about us as consumers and fans. It was interesting. You had the privilege last year to go into the bunker that IBM have in Wimbledon. And very simple. It's a dark room with hardly any windows on it and just lots of screens that people can look at. Stats have been around for the best part, 20 years. 25. 25 years. 25, yeah. Primarily focused on the US sports, which have always driven that as well. As Simon says, the NBA seems to be at the forefront of this. And do you think it has the use of data, even though it was originally kind of based around baseball and all being a numbers game, baseball seems to have perhaps fallen a little bit behind, maybe football and basketball over there. Is there a lesson in there for other sports that they need to be? I don't know if they necessarily fell behind or the others caught up. So I think with the speed of technology it enabled other sports to get there. So even now, you know, rugby probably one of the leading sports in the team performance side, how they've used data. Soccer, it's the massive purses in soccer that means that every club has technology now. The question is how it's the best practice and how they use it. So I don't think necessarily baseball fell behind. It's actually just, it's ubiquitous now. Soccer, we've seen a couple of teams in the UK and in Denmark and one in Germany as well that have really just thrown their whole lot in behind the whole idea of Billy Bean that we're going to pick our team based purely on the metrics, purely on the numbers. Simon, you mentioned about the fact that we need to be careful not to lose that sort of visceral quality. But what do you think is there, is there a balance point? Because if you're all hard and no head, you probably end up losing. There's definitely a balance. I mean, from a stats point of view, we launched a product this year with our first AI soccer product called Stats Edge. But actually what it's to do is take out the bulk of the match preparation work. But actually two different coaches with the same set of players, the same opposition, same match deck conditions will do something different. So it's actually how they derive the insights they want based on how they like to play. There's loads of examples of this. For example, our product was used by the Croatian, the World Cup this year, and they did really well. Whether that was the product or actually that was the coach or the players. So for me, I think it still comes down to the culture of the team, the players you have, how their motions are on the day, and it's supported by and powered by the technology and the data and the insights that derive from that. Okay, in terms of preparation, we can understand and we can see it in terms of team and the way that you build relationships between individual players relating their individual strengths. There's always been a dark shadow over performance enhancement when it comes to Olympic sport. And yes, here we're talking about the very heart of performance enhancement but using technology and using numbers and using knowledge as opposed to using synthetic drugs as such. Is that something that there's a bit of an irony in there? There's a bit of an argument that you can, if you want a performance to be natural, then having the money to invest in all of the right technology gives you as much of an advantage as EPO, for example. Well, the first thing is not illegal. But I think money is one of the things but actually it's obviously the cost technology is driven down all the time. So the player still has to take the learnings and the actions out of it to continuously improve. So it's that margin improvement week on week on week based on what, and that's where I suppose technology does, even in team scenario, it can be personalised to, okay, you need to do this to beat that opponent or to improve your performance. So yes, it does give them information the same way as a coach would tell you, I've watched you do your 100 meter sprint and you need to move that foot down a margin. So for me, they're not the same thing. Okay, and Simon, we talk about the players, it being the important thing that you have the data, but the data is easy. It's the analysis, the explanation and perhaps the absorption is the most important and the most challenging. Do you think is that a challenge for sporting organisations to get players to buy in or sport is a young person's game? Are the players that are coming through now so ingrained in numbers and data and performance that they're finding it much easier? I think there's a general realisation certainly among the younger generation that, you know, this is an era of data. It's an era of transparency and access to content and now young sports stars who are coming through college, football in the States or even here in Ireland, they've been tracked from early age, from as early as 2016. People will know where their strengths and weaknesses are, how they respond to training, how they respond to sleep patterns, health, nutrition, you name it. It's a prerequisite of the modern sports person to allow access to their data. It's a bit scary as we look at the future in GDPR days about what that might mean, how that might influence player contracts. Is it less about their skill? Is it more about their propensity to train, their stamina, their reaction times and how they respond to training? It's going to definitely influence the way in which people are put into sport, contracts are brought together, values are delivered. So there's a big change. Let's look at the Irish rugby team. The Irish rugby team, the national rugby team is widely applauded for the structure that's in place here in this country around rugby, the governance of it, the way it's delivered. It isn't just about the data, it's about how you use the data intelligently, recognizing the demands on human beings as athletes and then how to bring them together in a collective result such as we saw at the Ryder Cup where frankly, collectivism and team spirit presided over individual brilliance. So that's what we're seeing, a really interesting inflection point between the role of data but the need to still retain the analytical skills to apply that data for a meaningful result and a competitive edge. And that's where the tensions and the growing pains are right now. It's fascinating. It is, like two, three years ago, all of the talk in terms of sporting organizations were about the importance of gaining a player's image rights when it came to a contract. But the data rights are probably even more valuable. So for Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, when he's contemplating his next 90 to 100 million move or the Cristiano Ronaldo mark too, it will be at this stage, the fact that he, the fact that there are markers which suggest that he trains better on a Tuesday morning after he's had a bowl of porridge and before he's had a glass of orange juice, that Apple juice performs, he performs better on that than on orange juice. In terms of that kind of data and stats are producing a lot of data around the actual games and the performance, is there a point at which that becomes more valuable to an organization or more valuable to an individual? Oh, good question. And who's right to sell it? That's the value, ultimately, or what does the data tell you? So who owns the data? It really comes back to that question and how all these things align whether it's hardware data, tracking data from video. There's just so many sources of it now, is actually how do you bring all that together and then derive the insights from it? It's probably more value to the organization because they can commercialize it more than a player can. Do you actually think, sorry to interrupt, actually think that the role of the scout in the future in sport is going to be perhaps the most important role of any? When you think of 100 million being spent on a football player right now, the risk of that football player having an injury, being out of action for a year, what that does to your income, to your performance on the pitch, to sponsorship. So having a scout who can use data analytics to de-risk that investment by having as near as damn it a confidence about that person's ability to perform in all of the roles, the positions, the environments, is incredibly important. So these are multi-million dollar investments, almost like startup businesses that are now translating into individual athletes and I can see the manager, the agent of tomorrow being utterly disregarded in this process as it becomes between the athlete, the fan, the club and the performance data around that. We won't need agents in the future. A lot of it will be de-risked through data and analysis and modeling but hopefully there'll still be enough left for the individual's performance on the field of play. Which is why the demand for data for players younger and younger. So you're now going down to under 19s, under 17s because you already say what's their predictive value for the future. We're certainly seeing that in terms of scouting. And predict is the title of the conference today. The ability to predict a sporting outcome is, we mentioned betting and gambling and things of that briefly earlier but the value of being able to predict the future performance of a 17-year-old soccer player is enormous. How genuine is it? How genuine can the performance of the human body on an individual basis? I can understand aggregated how that would, you know, how you will be able to model and you will be able to predict. But on an individual basis, are there not too many variables in terms of, you know, he gets up, he puts his foot down on a stone, he twists his ankle, she, you know, just reacts differently in different circumstances. How valuable is the sports data in those terms? Can it overcome the individual? Yeah, so that's where the AIPs comes in. So they're looking at multivariant components, really, in terms of, for example, you put Johnny Sexton in a Lancer team on a certain day against this opposition versus a different, maybe, stadium or a different component. And how is it like to change the outcome of the game? So that's where the AIPs can run them scenarios. Let me look at the last three, five, ten games where he played for Ireland and it was an away game and his opposite number was X versus Y. So that's where the heavy lifting is done by technology as opposed to a performance analyst having to go away and look at individual clips of video footage to try to actually put that analysis together. So they can give him something to work with as a player and also the coaching panel has something that they can look at for him individually, but actually him in the combination of the team. The concept has always been there in sport, I guess, hasn't it, that the Miami Dolphins went to New England Patriots on Sunday night. They'd only won there once in their last 27 visits. Therefore, they've got no chance of winning. And yet the Dolphins and the Patriots teams over the last 27 years are materially different from the team today. So inherently we get it as sports fans that history and the past informs the future, but never as much as it actually can do now. Because it's so accurate, the prediction technology is so accurate that we still get the upsets, which is what we're all looking for. But that's the exciting thing about sport, but it's because it's so accurate and it's prediction capability now. And the business of sport has grown up based on the fact that we can continually encourage people to get interested in it, to buy the jersey, to pay for the television subscription and things like that. Has it raised, has the use of data raised the value of sport in terms of its value to an organization, its value to a media company, its value to a sponsor? You work across a lot of different organizations that would be out there selling their wares to potential sponsors and all the rest. Has data become a critical component of that? Yeah, I would go so far to say data has become the new currency in sport and in the commercialization of sport and indeed how people engage with it as fans. I'm reminded of the Nike deal with the NBL, Nike Connect deal. In the jerseys there's a tag. You can, as a fan, if it's your favorite player, you can access and unlock content through an app. You can understand the relative performance of particular plays by the player on court. It's no coincidence that the three pointers become so big in the NBL because they did the stats, they ran the numbers and they realized it was worth the risk. That's why 50% more points are scored with three pointers now than six years ago. That's why Steph Curry's a phenomenon. So the analysis of data is undoubtedly opening opportunities for sponsors to tell a different story beyond who won, who lost. If you look at Amazon Prime and what they've done with Man City in the All For Nothing program, that was deliberately done by the club to provide brands and viewers with a chance to see the players in their lifestyle away from their pitch. We even saw one of the players' daughter's birthdays being celebrated. So yeah, it's unlocking new ways of engaging. It is delivering more value into the sponsorship mix and it's providing, I think, a more competitive story for consumers and athletes alike. One of the touchdowns for the Patriots on Sunday night, Tom Brady threw to a new wide receiver over in the left-hand side of the end zone. Within 10 minutes on the NFL website, they had a view from inside Tom Brady's helmet. So there's obviously a camera somewhere in on around his helmet and they were able to zoom from an overhead shot, come around 360 and then inside his helmet. Now inside his helmet just means that they closed down the letterbox format. But I feel within 10 minutes of having seen this happening live across the Atlantic that I'm actually, I am Tom Brady now. In the future you will see virtual reality playing that. You will be on that field of play. You can begin to now. There's already virtual reality where you're a camera behind the helmet of the players at NFL and you're effectively on the pitch. Encrypted messages are being sent into the helmets of the players. There are even sensors on gloves so that the wide receiver, you can determine whether or not he's genuinely caught the ball in the end zone or not. It's remarkable the way technology and data are transforming the experience of sport. Transforming the performance of it but also the way that we experience it as fans. So stats effectively grew up as a media play, didn't you? That it was to enhance the coverage that we consume from media to the point where you were bought by a media company and then back out into private hands. But has media been the big driver? Because sport, as we mentioned at the beginning, sport is quite traditional. Would sport have gone to this extent if it hadn't been for the push in the press of media? I think it's the last two years where sport and entertainment has really come together. And this piece about engaging the fan, whether it's at home or away and that sports data can, you know, for people who are fanatical about their sports data or actual casual fans of sport, it can engage a bigger audience. So that's a big driver for it. But the data points enable organisations to do more. So, for example, if you want... We did one in the US where every time your team scored a touchdown, a light went off in your garden, it was Budweiser linked. So it enables you to engage brands with fans. And it goes back to the storytelling piece, is actually fans are looking to be engaged with their team. So it enables sport to have a wider conversation on a daily basis, whether it's match day or not. And that's the secret of your sports organisation. It is. And it's become a product in itself, the data as an element of the media production. So in Ireland here, the GAA sells its official data partner, official analytics partner is sure. And their concept is because, you know, you're always ready. You know what's coming, you're always ready and that. But there's hard cash value in that, which never existed before. So you can only slice and dice so many parts of the actual playing performance. This creates something else entirely. And is that the same across all the sports? Like in the US, it's the Bud-like moment. And sure, Unilever do it with rugby, I think, in the UK, and the soccer. It's absolutely massive. And the commercial value of sports to big technology players. I think that's one of the things that's changed where you have Amazon and Facebook and Twitter all in the mix now competing with your guys. And you'd know this better than I would Simon. You know, with your broadcasters there, because they can commercialise the data piece with all around, if you look at Google search, or they can actually put it out on their platform, so it'd be Facebook or Twitter. OK. Is there a danger? You mentioned, Simon, about that 99 cent for the last quarter. Is there a danger in five years' time that actually that's where the real magic happens? So actually, why do we bother playing the first three quarters? Why can't we just emulate the first three quarters and then put it live? Because people don't want to watch sport for an hour. They only want to watch for 15 minutes. Is there a danger that we might actually get to that point? There's certainly a risk. And the MBL have been very public in saying that this is an experiment just to see how it's taken on board. If it turns out that it's hemorrhaging broadcast interest and value, then I'm sure they'll have a rethink about it. But, you know, we're in a world now where so much is bite-sized. It's all about short form content, busy, busy world. So sports have to adapt and have to recognise that we as consumers are living in a different world to where we were 10 or 20 years ago. That's why we're seeing the emergence of short form games of golf with golf sixes, cricket, what was happening there. Rugby's the same. Rugby Sevens is going through the roof right now globally. So there's got to be a balance between the traditional forms of the sport that some of us have grown up with and the more bite-sized forms that a more instant generation are looking for. And I don't think anyone's cracked that yet. I think it's fair to say, whilst we're here talking about data, we don't have the answers because no one's quite sure what's coming next. And we're all trying to second-guess it. Perfect link into bite-size because sports is traditionally soccer. Well, cricket over five days, soccer over 90 minutes. Rugby over 80 minutes. Scaler games over 70 minutes. And this session over a mere 30 minutes. We could talk for a lot longer. And we'll be around afterwards if anybody wants to pick up the conversation. But just before we go, could I just ask you again? We're in predict. So could I ask you what do you think over the next 12 months? Maybe that's too long. Maybe 12 months, 24 months, 24 minutes. What are the... What's the one thing that you can see on the horizon that's going to be the next step forward in terms of data and sport? Okay, I'm going to be greedy and go for two things. I think one is about the non-traditional broadcast players becoming the first port of call for right-holders. So if you think of Netflix, Netflix, what are they going to spend about $8 billion on content? I see Netflix, we see Netflix as being a broadcaster of choice for sport in the future. Ditto, Amazon, who've recently dipped their toe into the Premier League, and they'll be broadcasting games from next year. So I think we'll see the traditional model change quite substantially and fast. The other thing is eSports. And for those of you who aren't familiar with eSports in the room, it's what most of our children are doing, I can assure you. And it's competitive online video gaming. The recent League of Legends finalists was played out in Paris to 60 million unique users. Now that type of audience and the time that that audience are engaged for is absolute gold dust for brands and properties and promoters alike. So I think it's the changing media platform and eSports would be my two bets for the next 24 months. Okay, and Gronja? I think that, for me, one of the big things is that data and technology will solve the concussion challenge. Okay. I think that within the next 24 months is really achievable. And other than that, I think probably less hardware, more data for team performance. Okay. Great. Ladies and gentlemen, Gronja Barry of Stats, Simon Long of the Sports Consultancy. Thank you.