Opta (Stats Perform)

Opta is the name that defined football data collection and established the analytical vocabulary that the global football industry now speaks. Founded in London in 1996, Opta began as a small operation manually recording every event in English football matches — every pass, tackle, shot, cross, interception, and foul. Over the decades, they built the most comprehensive and granular match data archive in world football, covering over 500 competitions across the globe.

The impact of Opta's data on how football is understood, discussed, and played cannot be overstated. Before Opta, football analysis was largely subjective — pundits opined based on what they saw, scouts evaluated players based on gut feeling, and managers made tactical decisions based on experience and intuition. Opta provided the objective foundation that made football analytics possible. Every advanced metric that football fans and professionals now take for granted — expected goals, progressive passes, pressing sequences — traces its lineage back to Opta's event data.

Every major football club in the world uses Opta data for scouting, recruitment, and performance analysis. Every major football broadcaster uses Opta statistics to enhance their coverage. Every major football betting operator uses Opta data to model markets. The company's data has become so foundational that it functions as a shared language — when two analysts discuss a player's performance, they are almost certainly referencing the same Opta dataset.

Opta became part of Stats Perform in 2019 when STATS LLC and Perform Group merged, combining Opta's data collection excellence with advanced AI and predictive analytics capabilities. The Opta brand remains recognizable and trusted in the football world, and their methodology of detailed event-level data collection continues to set the standard for sports data quality globally.