Welcome to the next article in our series focusing on ‘The business of sport’. This month the focus is on a NI company who is a global leader in GPS Performance Tracking systems; Statsports.

With 80% of Premier League teams as clients it’s no wonder they are the global leader in this sector.

Statsports began in 2007 when the two founders Alan Clarke and Sean O’Connor, acted as a distributor for GPS devices to a number of premier league teams.

During this time they began meeting with these teams to find out exactly what type of information they wanted to analyze. As it turned out, almost every coach felt the current products on the market did not match their needs, from this Statsports was born!  The two entrepreneurs then decided to build a product around the needs of coaches which is now used by the best teams in the world across multiple sports in the top competitions including the Premier League, NFL, NBA, La Liga and many more right through to the 2014 World Cup.

Their product streams live data in real-time through their software as well as logging all data after a training session or match for full analysis by the performance coach.

So what does the future hold for Statsports?

The company has recently opened an office in Chicago and hired new staff in America. In addition, they have signed deals with teams in the NFL, NBA and college markets including Carolina Panthers, Cincinnati Bengals, Chicago Bulls, Washington Wizards and the number one ranked college basketball team University of Kentucky. Finally, they have recently signed a league wide deal with the RFL in England which will see them enter the broadcast industry.

Pretty impressive for a company from these shores!

Follow the guys progress at statsports.com  and on twitter @statsports

Geoff run’s his own Sports Consultancy, working with clients such as FIFA across the world. He is also on the board of SportNI.  You can follow Geoff on twitter @geoffwnjwilson or Linkedin at www.linkedin.com/in/geoffwnjwilson