Thinking out loud: Veo and StatsBomb synergies
Veo are largely about allowing grassroots football teams to better analyse their performance through data derived from video. StatsBomb help recruitment departments unearth talent, often from the lower leagues, by using data that is also derived from video.
How StatsBomb gets its data
As I understand it, StatsBomb can only derive data from ‘dirty’ broadcast feeds. They don’t, for example, as far as I’m aware, have stadium access that allows them to process data from clean feeds captured at source (which would allow them to generate data faster, and, with access to more angles, more reliably and accurately). I also assume that there’s quite a bit of quality control that has to be applied to the data they capture from dirty feeds, for a whole number of reasons. I’d be surprised if processed data goes directly from its generation on capture, straight into the dataset.
How Veo generates data
Veo is generating data in its editor platform directly from its proprietary camera. While it doesn’t capture a huge amount of events just now, the types of events it’s going to capture is clearly going to grow. Unlike StatsBomb, that event data goes straight into the dataset from its generation on capture. The scale of Veo’s model means there’s no opportunity for there to be any layer of human-intervened quality control.
The recruitment challenge
Right now the next Messi or Rapinoe is playing football at grassroots level in a game that’s being processed by a Veo camera. But, as far as I see it, that data is not ending up in the StatsBomb dataset, so a remote football analyst is not going to be able to spot that potential talent and flag it up to recruitment.
What if?
So, that leaves me with a number of questions. As always, I won’t have been the first person to ask these I’m sure, so maybe there are solutions out there? In the unlikely scenario there isn’t, there’s clearly an opportunity for some synergies here…
- What if the data Veo generates could be gotten into a StatsBomb format?
- What if I could a) plug a Veo camera into StatsBomb’s stack, or b) route a dirty broadcast feed through Veo’s ingestion and processing pipeline?
- What if I could compare the two?
Conclusion
Some of this of these questions may just already be answered. For example, to the extent that any Veo captured game is broadcast as such, then of course Statsbomb can process it anyway. Clubs that are already using both Veo and Statsbomb likely see the two technologies as serving different needs, where Veo is more about human-driven video analysis in training or academy set-ups (where the captured event data helps speed that process up). Even so, at that level, at a minimum, if I was a first-team analyst working at a club, using StatsBomb as a key tool, I think I’d be wondering what that under-12 midfielder who’s scored an 8 minute hatrick’s 360 radar looks like, having just watched that in Veo’s editor.
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