SVG Sit-Down: Stats Perform's Charles Kaplan on 30 Years of Opta, a Busy Summer of Soccer, What's Next

The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagues and teams, broadcasters and streamers, and rightsholders to deepen storytelling and enhance the fan experience

As Opta marks its 30th anniversary, the British company born of manually coding 50-60 data points per football match from VHS footage now generates nearly 3.8 million data points per game through AI-enriched tracking. That trajectory - from post-match collection to real-time, AI-driven delivery - captures both how far sports data has come and how central it has become to modern broadcast production.

Stats Perform officially launched in 2019 after U.S. investment firm Vista Equity Partners acquired Europe-based Perform (including the Opta official-data platform) from DAZN and merged it with STATS LLC, a U.S.-based sports-technology, -data, and -content company, creating Stats Perform.

Stats Perform's Charles Kaplan: Our focus remains on helping our partners deliver faster, more engaging, and consistent content for their audiences, no matter the scale or speed required. SVG sat down with Stats Perform Chief Marketing Officer Charles Kaplan to walk through that evolution and the company's growing footprint in the U.S. market. He details the OptaAI Studio content suite, the company's positioning ahead of the expanded 2026 FIFA World Cup, and how tools like Opta Pulse and Opta Graphics help media teams scale short-form output without adding resources.

He also addresses the surging demand around in-play sports betting, the streaming-latency challenge facing live sports production, and why women's-sports data - anchored by the deepest women's-soccer dataset in the market - represents an opportunity that media partners should seize now rather than later.

Opta's hitting its 30th anniversary this year. That's a big deal. How has the company's role in sports production and broadcasting changed since the early days?

Opta's role in broadcast has evolved as sports data has moved from manual, post-match collection to real-time, AI-enriched delivery.

In 1996, Opta captured 50-60 data points per football match using VHS footage and manual coding.

The first significant shift came with live data capture. At UEFA Euro 2000, Opta delivered live player data during a major tournament for the first time, giving commentators new ways to highlight in-game trends as they happened. Ten years later, broadcasters used Opta-powered graphics and visualizations, including player touch maps, to enhance studio analysis.

Another major milestone came with the introduction of Expected Goals, which appeared on the BBC's Match of the Day Premier League highlights program in the UK for the first time in 2017. This showed how data could change the narrative and challenge conventions around how football is analyzed on broadcast.

[When] Opta's parent company, Perform Group, merged with STATS LLC, that combination accelerated our ability to develop and patent sophisticated AI models trained on Opta data, unlocking new ways to analyze sport and tell deeper stories that matter to fans.

Today, Opta collects roughly 13,000 core and player data points live for every match across hundreds of football matches on a typical match day. With Opta Vision, we then use AI to combine x/y tracking data with event data, generating nearly 3.8 million data points per match. That gives production teams richer insight into formations, fitness, passing options, run types, and playing styles, opening deeper analysis and new storytelling angles in broadcast coverage.

For U.S. sports-production and broadcasting folks who might not know Opta and Stats Perform that well, how exactly do you help media, teams, and sportsbooks connect with fans?

Stats Perform provides trusted sports data and propriety AI used by leagues, teams, broadcasters, streamers, and sportsbooks globally. Opta data covers 3,900+ competitions across 20+ sports, collected and quality-controlled in real time to deliver consistent, reliable insight at scale.

This foundation allows us to turn sports moments into meaning. We develop tools that help media and production teams deliver the content, insight, and clips fans expect across the full match cycle.

OptaAI Studio, our content-creation suite, sits at the center of that:

Opta Live surfaces relevant on-field moments as they happen.

Opta Search enables fast access to trusted stats, patterns, and historical context.

Opta Graphics turns data into engaging, ready-to-use on-screen visuals.

Opta Pulse automates video-highlight-clip creation from match footage for sharing across platforms.

The tools that make up OptaAI Studio help teams produce more output faster to ensure their channels are the first to publish content and drive the narrative around the biggest global sporting events in real time across broadcast, digital, and social-media channels.

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup almost here, how are you gearing up to help broadcasters, streamers, and rightsholders deliver data-driven fan experiences?

The expanded format of the 2026 FIFA World Cup will create a significant increase in content-production requirements. More matches mean more moments to capture, more assets to produce, and more competition for audience attention.

Stats Perform will support teams across several of the tournament's rightsholders worldwide, helping them manage that increased volume and maintain high-quality output at scale.

In addition to capturing and delivering detailed performance data to broadcasters and streamers in real time, our Data Insights team will provide key tournament facts, storylines, and live support that can be used directly in coverage. That reduces the need for production teams to build analysis from scratch during peak moments.

We will also support production on the ground. Experienced video

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/06/01/svg-sit-down-stats-performs-cha...
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