Football Data Providers Compared: Opta, StatsBomb, SkillCorner and Wyscout

Opta is the largest event-data provider in football. Owned by Stats Perform since 2019, it has its origins in 1996 as a UK-based collection operation and now covers more than 600 competitions worldwide. Opta's product is structured event data: every pass, shot, tackle, foul, dribble and defensive action in a match, with x-y co-ordinates, timestamps, body part used, outcome and a handful of contextual qualifiers. The Opta feed is what powers most broadcast graphics, including the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A live overlays, as well as the Match Centre data on most major football sites.

Opta's xG model is the most widely cited public xG in football media. The Athletic, ESPN, FBref and most national newspapers display Opta xG by default. The model uses approximately 250,000 shots in its training set, with features including shot location, body part, assist type, defender pressure and goalkeeper position. The downstream products include Opta Power Rankings, Opta predictive markets, and the Opta Vision tracking layer launched in 2023 (Stats Perform, Opta Vision announcement). Opta's coverage breadth is its single biggest competitive advantage: no other provider matches the league coverage at the same depth.

StatsBomb was founded in 2017 by Ted Knutson and acquired by Hudl in 2023. Its product is also event data, but with more qualifiers per event than Opta and a proprietary 360 freeze-frame layer that records the positions of every player on the pitch at the moment of every shot, pass and key event. The 360 layer is the differentiator: it allows derived metrics like expected possession value and on-ball value to take account of defender positioning, which standard event data cannot. StatsBomb sells primarily to clubs (over 100 professional clubs use the product) and to broadcasters running deeper tactical analysis.

StatsBomb's xG model trains on a different dataset to Opta's and uses different qualifiers, which produces different xG values for the same shot. The two are correlated but not identical. StatsBomb's public output is sparser than Opta's, with FBref showing StatsBomb data for the major leagues and a small number of free competitions available for research via the open-data GitHub repository. Most StatsBomb-derived public analysis appears on The Analyst, StatsBomb's own articles, and academic football-analytics papers.

SkillCorner, founded in Paris in 2016 and acquired by Sportradar in 2024, sells tracking data extracted from the broadcast television feed rather than from in-stadium optical-tracking cameras. The technique uses computer vision on the broadcast picture to infer the position of every player on the pitch at 10 Hz, even players not on screen at a given moment, producing a continuous trajectory dataset across the full match. SkillCorner's commercial advantage is that the product works for any match with a broadcast feed, which means coverage extends to lower divisions, women's football, and international competitions where stadium tracking is not installed.

The output is primarily physical metrics: total distance, high-speed running distance, sprint count, acceleration and deceleration loads. Multiple Premier League and Championship clubs use SkillCorner alongside in-stadium tracking data (typically Second Spectrum or Hawk-Eye) to compare opposition physical profiles. SkillCorner has also published a series of tactical metrics including pressing intensity, line height and depth, and off-ball runs, increasingly visible in mainstream tactical coverage (SkillCorner research blog).

Wyscout, owned by Hudl since 2019, is the dominant scouting platform in professional football. The product combines event data (collected by Wyscout's own team, not licensed from Opta or StatsBomb) with a video archive of every match in covered competitions, allowing scouts to filter by metric and then watch the relevant video clips. The unique value is in the breadth of coverage: Wyscout covers over 750 competitions, including the lower divisions and academy leagues that Opta and StatsBomb do not.

Wyscout's event data is less detailed than StatsBomb's or Opta's for the top leagues, but it covers competitions the other two do not touch. The platform is used by virtually every professional recruitment department in Europe and increasingly in South America, Africa and Asia. The trade-off is that Wyscout data should not be treated as comparable to Opta or StatsBomb data when shifting between leagues, as the collection methodology and the qualifier set are different.

For public data, the easiest cue is the platform. FBref displays StatsBomb data for the major leagues. The Athletic, BBC and most British print media use Opta. The Analyst is Opta's in-house publication. Sofascore and FotMob use a mix, primarily Opta for event data and proprietary models for ratings. For physical and tracking metrics, the source is usually either SkillCorner (broadcast tracking) or Second Spectrum/Hawk-Eye (stadium tracking), depending on the league.

The practical implication is that xG figures and event-data counts should be compared within a provider, not across providers. An xG of 1.8 from Opta does not equal an xG of 1.8 from StatsBomb because the models are different and the training data is different. A press-resistance metric from Wyscout does not directly compare to a press-resistance metric from StatsBomb, because the underlying event data uses different qualifier definitions. For long-running analysis, the safe default is to pick one provider per metric family and stay with it.

• Opta. Event data + broadcast graphics. Owned by Stats Perform. Widest league coverage. Standard public xG source.
• StatsBomb. Enriched event data + 360 freeze-frames. Owned by Hudl. Used by 100+ clubs. Visible via FBref.
• SkillCorner. Broadcast-tracking + physical metrics. Owned by Sportradar. Coverage extends to lower divisions and women's football.
• Wyscout. Scouting event data + video clips. Owned by Hudl. 750+ competitions. Standard recruitment platform.

Most Premier League and top-five-league clubs subscribe to all four providers in some combination, with Opta and StatsBomb covering the event-data tier, SkillCorner or Second Spectrum covering the tracking tier, and Wyscout covering the scouting tier. The redundancy is deliberate: a club building an xG model wants both Opta and StatsBomb feeds to triangulate; a club assessing opposition press wants both event-data pressing actions and SkillCorner physical pressing metrics.

For lower-division and amateur clubs, the cost of multiple subscriptions is prohibitive, and the typical setup is Wyscout for scouting plus a single event-data provider (often Opta via a third-party licensed feed). For independent analysts and football media, FBref (StatsBomb-backed for major leagues) and Sofascore (Opta-backed) remain the most accessible free entry points, with the open StatsBomb data on GitHub as the standard learning dataset for new analysts building their first models.