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Betting & Affiliates

Opta Points™: Create Game-Long Fan and Bettor Entertainment

By: Zaid Khan

We’re always looking for new, innovative ways to analyse sports— ways that make betting more engaging, help bettors find value, and provide game-long entertainment. A big part of this is making every player’s contribution in a match more appealing and meaningful, which is why we’ve created Opta Points™.

 



What is Opta Points™?

Opta Points™ is an objective, transparent, and trusted measurement of a player’s impact, calculated in real-time, available at scale, spanning thousands of players and multiple leagues. It’s already enabling new creativity within sportsbook trading floors, dramatically increasing the number and variety of betting markets sportsbooks can offer at a player and team level.

How does Opta Points™ work?

Opta Points™ condenses a player’s on-field statistics into an easy-to-understand, trusted points total. It transforms a player’s performance on the pitch into point-scoring actions that can be compared with other players, games, leagues, and even historical seasons.

One factor we focused on deeply throughout the process of building Opta Points™ was to create a system which highlights every player’s contribution, no matter where they play or how many minutes they had on the pitch, giving due recognition to each action. And Opta Points™ does just that, distilling 18 unique in-game stats into a single metric for each player.

This means that fans and bettors won’t just focus on single actions like shots, saves, cards, tackles, or passes; instead, they will appreciate every facet of a player’s game. This will create game-long entertainment, keeping them interested in every touch, pass, tackle, shot, and save.

How did Opta Points™ rate performances during Euro 2024?

Proof of this can be seen in some standout performances at the Euros, featuring a monstrous goalkeeping display featuring 11 saves by Giorgi Mamardashvili, an all-action midfield masterclass from Fabian Ruiz, and a gritty shift from Croatian full-back Josip Stanisic.


How Novibet used Opta Points
during the Euros and Copa América

Novibet, a multi-territory sportsbook – is just one example of an operator aligning with our vision. Introducing a wide range of new betting markets leveraging our proprietary Opta Points™ metric for Euro 2024 and Copa América.

Tournament-special markets create tournament-long interest in teams and players and dramatically increases the ways bettors can think about the tournament and continue to be invested – even if their chosen team or player isn’t leading the golden boots charts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To bespoke Opta Points™ markets for individual games, ranging from over / under team and player Opta Points™ totals, player of the match-style markets and player head-to-heads….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Novibet also created minute-long “head-to-head” preview videos for each game using Opta Points™. They highlighted key players with the highest season totals for Opta Points™ from both teams to help bettors make informed decisions.


What competitions is Opta Points™ available for?

Opta Points™ is available for over 5,500 matches, including the Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, and other major leagues across the globe. It also covers international competitions like the World Cup, Euros, Copa America and AFCON among others.

As with all Opta for Betting competitions – we have historical data to help your trading teams develop your own pricing models, fast. You can also monitor in-play points for matches at both player and team levels and review final points using our flexible filters to settle wider markets.

What else are we building with Opta Points™?

We’ve introduced an interactive, customisable, and engaging Opta Points™ widget to help your customers monitor each player’s contribution.  This widget updates live, with the leaderboard dynamically reflecting players’ changing Opta Points™ totals throughout the game.

Our world-famous data insights team are also producing multi-language facts-based content focused on Opta Points™ – these short, easy-to-understand insights can help your customers to quickly understand the form of players, their trends over the season and more.

Our facts-based products are incredibly popular because of how flexibly you can use them – in banners on your sportsbook, under markets, or within wider content on social, email or blogs. You can get a sneak peek of what’s to come for the new season with our carousel highlighting the best Opta Points™ Facts from the 2023/24 season, featuring Rodri, Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane.

Soon, Opta Points™ will be available inside our pre-match and live-game assistant, the Content Player Pro. This will put historical and live Opta Points™ information right in your customers eyelines – helping them make informed bets on Opta Points™-powered markets and monitor each player’s contribution in real-time. We’re also adding it to our brand new interactive live streaming feature: Interactive Smart Stats Overlays™.