How can we leverage our user network & embrace the “network effect” & drive even greater insight value for our club users?

Investopedia.com calls the network effect of any product or service a phenomenon where increased numbers of people or participants improve the value of the product / service.

Network effect examples include:

• eBay – as the number of eBay users grow, prices fall, supply increases & eBay offers more value/utility to its users.
• Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. – the more users/profiles on each platform, the potential value of the platform to all users grows with each new user.
• Cryptocurrency – in theory, the more people that deal & trade in cryptocurrency, the more attractive this new form of money becomes.

It seems lofty to mention these huge companies in an article about our own sportstech start-up, but the concept of the network effect struck us during a recent workshop. How can we at PlayerStat Data embrace this network effect & provide a unique advantage to our clients as we grow?

As a short recap on ourselves & our offering, we are specialists in soccer player performance data solutions, providing a 360° Player Development data monitoring platform for elite clubs & academies in the USA & Canada. This data platform offering is solely focused on U13-U19 age levels.

Our US & Canadian club users can access their own players’ on-field performance data output AND each individual player event clipped & downloadable in 10 sec videos (approx. 950 per match).

Unlike several soccer data platforms available to clubs at the highest level of soccer, our performance data platform output is accessible to the user only.

Large platforms such as Wyscout & Instat offer an entire league/country’s data output to all who subscribe to a particular package.

With our clients having their own data platform, this ensures ALL their player data is securely maintained in-house and out of the reach of rival club.

This offers a true competitive advantage to our users over those, well, that don’t.

So, how can we leverage our user network further to embrace the “network effect” and drive even greater insight value for our users?

Player Benchmarking

At PlayerStat Data, we’re currently developing our own early player benchmarking models. Users can currently assess how their players are performing across a range of metrics & data ranges (ie. month-by-month, live season totals etc.) – what if they could take this data output & compare their players to the best data output across age, region, and position?

Take the NorthEastern region of the USA as an example – 1000s of youth soccer clubs & academies, 100s of 1000s of players, 100s of colleges & recruiters and 100s of 1000s of parents.

The data outputs we collect in this region will increase by approx 1 million individual datapoints every few weeks (on-field performance data, player tracking data, event location data etc.), based on the number of clients from the NE corner.

As we welcome more clubs & academies from this region into our PlayerStat Data family, our data output collection increases exponentially, meaning that the number of datasets increases with each user added and in turn, the value & potential of our benchmarking insights increases with each added user.

More clients = more games tagged = more data points collected = greater insights

This means:

1. Club & academy users can power their Player Development pathways to an even greater extent than before.
2. College scouts & recruiters will be now exposed to vastly enhanced player data profiles (not just video highlight reels) and,
3. Players & parents can get an objective gauge/ranking around where they sit when compared to players of the same age, in the same position and in the chosen region for the model.

At PlayerStat Data, we’re already pushing the boundaries of what we can do to help our clients power their Player Development pathways.

• Drilling down into our data content with current users to ensure we are collecting what THEY need for THEIR operations.
• Investing in AI model development to collect player & ball tracking data to give greater context to player event data (ie. add location data)

And now, we are embracing the potential of the network effect within our user family, where we will ultimately enhance the power & value of our data insights as we grow across the USA & Canada.

At PlayerStat Data, our 360° Player Development data platform will reimagine & revolutionize how soccer clubs & academies monitor their youth players’ development pathways. Marrying five key facets of player development into one platform, clubs & academies will be able to access data platform content that is unavailable anywhere else.

Reach out to us at info@playerstatdata.com for further information – clubs & academies, enhance YOUR own operations by fully powering YOUR players’ development pathways.