Premium Cricket Services (PCS) Product Manager, Will Howie explores why Betradar’s unique approach to data is set to enhance the world of sport, starting with the game of cricket….

PERCEPTION

The cricket betting market is currently and traditionally very stable. It’s very reliable, it wins two or three per cent all the time, it covers all the games that are live on TV.

A lot of markets will be suspended, a lot of the selections aren’t actually offered for the majority of most games that are covered. It’s been this way for a while.

Many of the people driving these markets have been paid to watch cricket for the last ten years. At the end of each of those years they can then give a report to their boss saying ‘all well here gaffa: situation remains the same, no need for any change’.

And so the boss himself has a product there that he doesn’t need to think about, he doesn’t need to change. As a result, I think the majority of the market has accepted that we don’t need another cricket product, thank you very much!

OPPORTUNITY

But we take that attitude and see it as a really big opportunity because of the sense of stagnation and the lack of vision. It’s an opportunity to fill the gap and be the ones to turn up with a different, progressive and intelligent product that can help clients really clean up. And that’s where our Premium Cricket Services (PCS) team fit in.

A WIDER RE-EVALUATION

I would note though that this kind of inertia isn’t specific to cricket. It’s found across the industry and across various sport. For example, in actual media consumption of sport and sports high performance you see the same kind of thing with old-fashioned decision makers who refuse to accept modern progressive thinking, especially with regards to data and data analysis.

The decisions they’ve made may have always worked. But now, the modern, smart, progressive data-driven thinking is starting to breakthrough the cracks of that conventional wisdom within sport. Which is good given it is important to the legacies of sport too.

And it’s all, in my opinion, driven by smart data analysis. We, as Betradar’s cricket department, like to consider ourselves part of this movement.  

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The decisions they’ve made may have always worked. But now, the modern, smart, progressive data-driven thinking is starting to breakthrough the cracks of that conventional wisdom within sport. Which is good given it is important to the legacies of sport too.   ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

UNCONVENTIONAL “TRADERS”

The unique thing about our team is that they’re not conventional traders.

People within these sorts of jobs in this industry are usually termed “traders”. But we don’t hire traders, we hire scientists. People who don’t approach their task as a matter of trading, they consider it a matter of sports analysis first. They consider it as a matter of economics and as a matter of game theory.

It’s this unique approach that gives us a different output and therefore much more positive results.

Between us, we have been able to develop an incredibly good product. A product that is now not just churning out betting odds, but actually acting as a comment on the game itself and actually really starting to inform the strategy within the sport of cricket itself. And this is very exciting.

DISRUPTING ANALYSIS

It’s a product that has directed us to leads away from betting, and away from gambling, towards more analysis of the sport itself, which, again, is hugely exciting.

The long-term road map then is to convince the industry as a whole that this progressive and analytical approach is the way forward and is worthwhile. It starts with cricket for us, it starts with dominating the cricket market.

In the short term though our clients have access to the world’s best cricket product and that’s across 1,200 games per year. That’s already the biggest number you can get from a data provider like us…by a long way. But once again, there’s always room for change, always room for improvement, so we’d like to increase that number significantly.

This year, for me personally, as I see it, it’s all about emerging markets. Places like the US, and Asia specifically for cricket. It’s going to be very interesting to see how people embrace the changes that are expected over the next 12 months. 

At the moment the environment of our industry within the UK is very well established comparatively speaking. As I said before, a lot of the products the user experiences are already well set, so the type of thing a user will receive coming in to this market is not likely to change massively.

However, in the US and, to use India as the big example for us in cricket, we have an almost completely blank slate there to work with, to build a new market there.

So again, we see it as another opportunity. We can set a new standard for what consumers can expect, we can dictate what the betting products of the future will look like using this new market as a starting point.

We may be well-established, but with our modern scientific and analytical approach and understanding of sports data across all its wide-reaching opportunities and markets, it’s just the start for Betradar, cricket and, potentially, the sport industry as a whole.

To learn more about Betradar’s Premium Cricket Services (PCS) visit us at ICE, stand S1-150 – book a meeting here.

There’s also more information within our 2018 product brochure and at our website here.