Navigating through sport’s new normal

After sharing his thoughts on the widespread cancellation of live sport at the start of the lockdown, PA Media’s Sports Data Services Manager reflects on the more recent return of live sport, and how the teams he has worked with have responded to the change in sport’s new normal whilst looking ahead to a calendar of sporting events with more certainty.

March 23^rd seems like an age away. At that time Primer Minister Boris Johnson announced the UK lockdown, due to COVID, and all our worlds were turned upside down. Shortly after, I wrote about the challenges our business was facing, here at PA Media, specifically within the area of sport data.

Our day-to-day work effectively fell off a cliff, as sports around the world shut down, and the team were forced to adapt very quickly. For those who continued to work, remote-working and Microsoft Teams became our norm. Others agreed to furlough as, on a wider scale, our business had to make sizeable short-term changes, to prepare for the longer term challenges we might face – the landscape within the sport media and betting industry was turned on its head almost instantaneously. Once again, the adaptability and flexibility of our 24/7 sports data team was exemplary in ensuring the smooth continuity of our day-to-day business.

So, with a skeletal body of staff in place, we continued to monitor the sporting situation around the clock, cancelling events, and rescheduling events where applicable. Football all over the world fell by the wayside – only the Belarusian Premier League continued and we all soon became specialists. I adopted FC Minsk as “my team” which was rather apt given the capital’s team spent large parts in the bottom three, much like my “home team”, Hull City. We quickly began to realise just how much we took the plethora of live football in this country for granted! There were other sporting casualties – the obvious events included Tokyo ’20 and Euro 2020. Wimbledon went too, and the ICC Cricket T20 World Cup in Australia soon followed suit, all of which our team of sports specialists were eagerly preparing to provide the usual high levels of data coverage.

Then, slowly but surely, we began to see some sports return. The Aussies and Kiwis reinvented their Super Rugby to more localised competitions, while the NRL reappeared on our screens, played behind closed doors but with the now commonplace crowd noises piped into their TV coverage. The PGA announced a new schedule for the remainder of the year, which included a rescheduled PGA Championship at Harding Park, and the European Tour followed suit soon after. Formula 1 became inventive and decided to host multiple events at a couple of the same tracks while, slowly but surely, an agreement was put in place for the return of the Premier League – our solitary departmental Liverpool fan was smiling once again!

While many of the commercial conversations during the early part of lockdown were understandably based around service credits and helping all of our clients navigate their way through the most difficult of times, we slowly began to see an upturn in conversations of a more positive nature. Despite the understandable apprehension as everyone attempts to pre-empt what’s going to happen in the future, we’re seeing a reinvigorated interest in many rescheduled events, most specifically the Euros and Olympics – arguably the two biggest sporting events of 2021 (fingers crossed). We’ve also renewed long-standing agreements with some of our most high-profile clients – evidence enough that, despite the challenges of late, the efforts of our team, both operationally and commercially, have managed to maintain the confidence our clients have in the vast array of sports data services we continue to provide.

So, while we still find ourselves a “home straight” away from anything we might consider normality, and with a few fences to navigate our way over until then, the landscape we now see ahead offers a little more clarity than just a few months back – small but positive steps in the right direction.

Reflecting on the past few months our team has taken many positive learnings from the most challenging of times. Our ability to work remotely, while maintaining those high service standards, has offered valuable insights into how me might operate more consistently moving forward. That flexible working environment can offer a major boost to team morale which, in turn, will enhance our general productivity, and bring greater efficiency to our overall operation. Working around the clock 24/7 as we do, providing coverage of sports the world over, can bring its own challenges. Our team is made up of sports specialists from far and wide and improving the balance between office-working and remote-working can only benefit their work-life balance, something that is critical to a positive working environment.

So, as we reflect on the most challenging of periods for our business here at PA Media, not only do we take stock and learn from our experiences, but we also look forward to continuing along that upwards curve towards normality (hopefully!), where we’ll find a world with full-to-capacity stadiums (unless like me, you support Hull), and our team of specialists once again having the opportunity to do what we love doing best – collecting data from all major events in the sporting calendar with child-like enthusiasm!

Find out more about our sport data capabilities here.