The Premier League is back: the Opta insights powering the new season
The Premier League returns this weekend after an 89-day break, with nine new managers, six World Cup-winning Spanish players and hundreds of summer transfers creating no shortage of new stories.
For 30 years, trusted Opta data has helped Premier League teams and rights holders uncover and explain the competition’s biggest talking points.
In 2026-27, they will be able to go deeper than ever, with live Opta Vision metrics and products including Opta Search, Opta Live and Opta Graphics supporting analysis and storytelling before, during and after every match.
Ahead of the opening weekend, Stats Perform and FootballDataCo brought together representatives from all 20 Premier League clubs and broadcast rights holders for a dedicated workshop in London. The event showcased the Premier League Insights data, metrics and products available to their content and performance analysis teams throughout the new campaign.
Deeper in-game insights
Innovations introduced for 2026-27 mean that the volume of live insights available to teams and rightsholders, via feeds and integrated software, is unprecedented. The workshop kicked-off with Stats Perform’s Director of Analytics, Jonny Whitmore, providing a summary of Opta Vision’s suite of AI-enriched metrics, which will all be available live for the first time during the new season.
Jonny was joined during his presentation by Karl Sturgeon from Sky Sports, who as highlighted in the clip below, provided examples of how Opta Vision-powered insights went to air during their Premier League coverage last season, both in the pre-match build-up and as part of a more detailed analysis package on Monday Night Football.
Meeting changing audience expectations
Opta Analyst’s Managing Editor, Oliver Hopkins, provided insights into how Opta Vision data has been successfully utilised to provide a new storytelling dimension to their coverage of the Premier League.
His presentation highlighted changing trends in relation to what audiences are looking for in football content, with major increases in search traffic for off-ball insights such as counter pressing and low blocks. He then highlighted how Opta Analyst’s journalists are using metrics, such as off-ball runs, phases of play and passes under pressure, to better quantify a player’s off-ball involvement to add deeper, richer insights to their stories.
He concluded by highlighting the impact of stories enhanced by Opta Vision on engagement - with average dwell time, scrolling and share metrics all seeing significant upturns.
Powering the complete fan engagement content suite
The workshop concluded with presentations by Jens Melvang and Niall Hendry from Stats Perform’s product team.
Jens provided an in-depth analysis, using Opta Vision data from last season, to highlight the most successful approaches adopted by Premier League teams to break down a low block and example applications, both in a match analysis and recruitment context.
Niall then went on to highlight the integrations of Opta Vision data for the Premier League across the OptaAIStudio: with Opta Search providing the resource to unearth longer-term performance trends to power pre and post-match content, Opta Live delivering off-ball insights in real-time to drive in-game storytelling, and Opta Graphics empowering social teams to create Opta Vision derived visualisations across official channels simultaneously.
Miss the workshop? Watch the presentations now
All of the workshop’s presentations are available on demand. If you would be interested in watching them back, please complete the form below.
For further information on Opta’s coverage of the Premier League, please get in touch.
