Abstract
Data analytics has become a critical part of professional football.  It brings with it a number of challenging legal questions, brought into sharper focus by the reported ‘Project Red Card’ legal action, in which the legality of the systematised use of player performance data has been called into question.  Focussing on the position in English law, this two part article takes a holistic approach to assessing the legal issues presented by the data analytics movement.Part One sets out contextual information on the development of data analytics in football, before examining whether the data produced in football are capable of ownership, either in raw format or after manipulation, taking into account the nature of property and intangible assets, relevant intellectual property laws, and non-IP protections. Part Two of this article will go on to consider the position in respect of data protection law (including FIFA’s Data Protection Regulations). Finally, some broader legal issues are considered, including competition law and the regulation of artificial intelligence.The conclusions of Part One and Part Two together are that the intellectual property rights position is broadly positive for data analysts, with legal protections capable of application in many circumstances.  However, data protection law presents a more complicated problem, with a number of challenging compliance obligations for the analytics community, albeit with scope to exploit player performance data where those obligations are met.
Highlights
Part One sets out contextual information on the development of data analytics in football, before examining whether the data produced in football are capable of ownership, either in raw format or after manipulation, taking into account the nature of property and intangible assets, relevant intellectual property laws, and non-IP protections
Part Two of this article will go on to consider the position in respect of data protection law
Data analytics in football Professional association football1 is in the midst of a data revolution
Summary
It is stated above that ‘those who collect and manipulate data would seek proprietary rights in such data’ (emphasis added). If a statistic were the property of the player who generated it, the rights in that Raw Data would be to the exclusion of a third party data collector, or a league, and so on. This conception of ‘property’ is unduly narrow. ‘The concept of “property” may be elusive It is treated as a “bundle of rights”. There is ‘no general or comprehensive definition of property in statute or case law’ (UKJT 2019), and, as Yanner v Eaton shows, property is a flexible and amorphous concept. The UKJT finds that a thing may be capable of being property if it satisfies the indicia of property in National Provincial Bank and Fairstar Heavy Transport ‘unless there is some special legal reason to disqualify [it]’ (2019: paragraph 40)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
