The Control Centre is an innovative web based service that gives print, Internet and broadcast customers the ability to produce bespoke page-ready football content on-demand, direct to their desktop. Customers can then include this graphical output in their publication or broadcast, without any need for direct involvement from PA Sport.

Business Issue

The production of sports graphics panels for print, Internet and broadcast publications has traditionally been a manual and time-consuming process. Content sources have to be queried, timely information has to be passed into a graphics template and then modifications made by skilled design staff. This process takes time and any amends incur cost.

As each year goes by all media sectors are facing increasing competitive pressures to both reduce costs, whilst also maintaining or increasing the quality of the content provided. For the increasingly web literate sports consumer this invariably means more graphical content.

Finally, it is widely accepted that commentary on football is getting more data intensive as football itself gets more data intensive, with managers and coaches continually searching for a competitive edge. The media has to therefore look to the best possible sources of football statistics and effective ways to present this data.

The Solution

The Control Centre is a web-based service to allow on-demand querying of a database of football statistics and the presentation of this information into predefined graphical templates. Each of these templates can be saved and then downloaded to their own PC or Mac, in various formats required for web, print or broadcast use.

Graphical output made available by the Control Centre includes player head-to-heads, team head-to-heads and match summaries.

In addition, the Tablebuilder feature allows users to download a wide variety of statistics, for offline use in, say, Excel or their own graphics packages.

The Benefits

The key benefits of the Control Centre to publishers and broadcasters are:

• Unrivalled football data: access to player and team statistics for the two of the most prestigious sports leagues in the world, the English Premier League and the English Championship;
• Rich graphical content: the ability to illustrate this statistical content in easy to read graphical templates, that will hopefully engage their readership and maintain/improve circulation figures;
• On demand access: without the need for special software or downloads users with only a PC or Mac with web access can get 24/7 access to features of the product;
• Easy to use: any user with knowledge of the web will find the product straightforward and intuitive;
• Zero cost of integration: as a web based service fully hosted and supported by PA Sport the customer faces no internal IT cost or resource implications;
• Web & print integration: the product is available for use across both print and web versions of publications and so can be used to promote web use from print;
• Detailed research: broadcast researchers can use the product to create incisive discussion pieces and the agenda for in-programme analysis;
• Regional press: the level of graphical output of football statistics normally associated with the national press is now available to the UK's regional press.

Additionally in the Designer Edition of the product the customer can work with PA Sport to design a set of custom graphical templates that will unique to them and so will provide differentiation and added value for their customers.

For more information, please contact us.