# Tech, Data, and Gambling Reshape Sports Business

**Podcast:** FT Tech Tonic
**Published:** 2026-07-08

## Transcript

Technology is changing how we compete in sports.
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For as long as he can remember, Alistair Laurie has been obsessed with one football team.
Lifelong fan of Heart of Midlothian Football Club.
I think it was our first game when I was about five years old.
And to be fair, it's a bit of a blur from then.
Heart of Midlothian, or Hearts as they're known, are a team in the Scottish Premier League based in Edinburgh.
They've struggled in recent years.
For decades, in fact.
Scottish football has been dominated by two teams, Celtic and Rangers.
No one else has won the title for 40 years.
But last season, it seemed like Hearts might actually have a chance.
You start well, but Hearts have been there before when they started well and they get to about November time and they kind of fade away.
I think the first telltale sign probably would have been when they got to New Year's and they were top of the league.
And then the weeks go by and you're still top of the table.
They had a new backer.
A man named Tony Bloom who brought in a focus on football analytics using data and machine learning algorithms to pluck talented players from obscurity.
The approach had already produced results for Bloom at his English Premier League club Brighton and it seemed to be working for Hearts.
We had a lot of good quality of player.
You can tell that...
Some of the players they'd fit in were very seamless.
We brought in a guy called Claudio Braga, who basically won all the individual player awards in Scotland.
He came from Norwegian second tier.
Hearts, for so long irrelevant in the title race, were now in the ascendance.
I think Hearts were top of the table for 250 days consecutively.
So Hearts fans are getting excited.
They're on track to win the title.
But Celtic are catching up.
It came down to the final week of the season in May.
Hearts were playing Falkirk, while at the same time Celtic were playing Motherwell.
Hearts needed to win their game and hope that Celtic didn't win theirs.
Hearts won comfortably at their home ground of Tyne Castle.
Then fans like Alistair followed on their phones as Celtic played out the final minutes of their game.
It was the last home game for Hearts, so usually the players will go around and, you know, kind of clap the fans and the fans will reciprocate.
News kind of spread round that there'd been a 97th minute goal for Celtic at Motherwell and you just had that feeling that it was going to be something controversial.
And it was controversial.
Deep into injury time, with the score even, a long throw into the box from Celtic is headed away by a Motherwell defender.
Final push here from Celtic to try and win this game.
Trusty's gone down holding his face.
The referee plays on, but then...
The video assistant referees sat 10 miles away, intervened.
I wonder whether it's a hand.
That raised hand, the arm up, the left arm.
That's the verdict.
The video assistant referees had spotted a handball.
Fans started to boo.
The referee gives Celtic a penalty.
Penalty!
Kileshi Ihanaccio!
They score and win the game.
Iconic scenes!
Everything for Celtic.
Absor disgrace.
disgraceful decision.
This was no isolated incident.
Angry fans raging against VAR is increasingly common.
In the past, an incident like this would have been handled differently.
The on-field referee's split-second decision would have been final.
But technology can now force an alternative outcome.
For aggrieved fans, this can feel against the spirit of the game.
I've watched it back subsequently.
It still comes up in the feed.
I think this would torture me and I'm still not conclusive.
Because if it had been a handball, you would have admitted that.
I would have now, there would be nowhere near the amount of fury.
I mean, it was all, it went national, it went worldwide.
Because, again, because Hark's been the title race.
Not only was the call contentious, it had also come at an incredibly pivotal moment.
A few days later, Celtic would go on to win the final game of the season and their 56th Scottish title.
Hearts, after spending most of the season at the top of the league, would finish with nothing.
All thanks, according to Hearts fans at least, to VAR.
Video assistant refereeing was meant to make things fairer, but for Alistair, it was eradicating a vital human element of the game.
I think the handball is just going to take so long to get over.
I think if your supporter, your fizzing, had just such a bad decision, it's honestly shocking.
You've got to trust the referees because otherwise what's the point?
You can have a VAR referee in the entire game.
This is Tectonic from the Financial Times.
I'm FD Sports Editor Josh Noble.
Tech is fundamentally changing every aspect of athletic competition, from training to competing to watching.
That's all been visible at this year's World Cup.
But are these advances in technology leaving the world of sport better off?
In this episode...
I'll be looking at how technology has already transformed sports fandom.
Is it actually making sport more fun to watch, or does it risk overshadowing our enjoyment?
We'll be hearing about high-tech officiating, technologies meant to engage fans, including gambling, and the implications they've had for sports globally.
Let's start with the basics.
How did we get here?
How did Alistair get here?
to a place where video assistant refereeing can receive so much scorn.
By taking power away from on-field referees, everything stands a chance of being re-litigated.
For fans in the stand, every moment of elation comes with a caveat.
There are countless examples that have annoyed both spectators and pundits.
Oh, here we go.
VAR.
In 2022, players from the Italian club Juventus started celebrating what they thought was a winning goal.
Until it was announced, the VAR officials would check it, which led to an on-pitch brawl.
The drama just keeps coming here.
Was there a punch thrown there?
There was certainly arms flailing.
And they are checking the goal for a possible offside.
Two players were sent off, along with the Juventus manager, and the goal was disallowed.
And a notorious Tottenham Liverpool game where the referees union later released a statement saying there'd been a miscommunication between the referees and the VAR operators over whether Luis Diaz had been offside.
And in the World Cup, we've seen VAR mission creep as its role expands into fouls and decisions about corner kicks.
Taken together, many fans say that VAR is now dominating the game.
But that wasn't the original intention.
So back in 2001, it all started as a broadcast problem, not an officiating one, really.
This is Ben Crossing, the chief executive of Hawkeye, the company that provides VAR technology to the Scottish Premiership and many other sports leagues.
But Hawkeye didn't start with football.
It started with cricket.
Cricket viewers at home couldn't really understand what the umpire was being asked to judge, or in some ways, really what was the story about what was going on on the pitch.
Cricket can be a complicated, at times, esoteric sport.
Hawkeye's technology used a set of high-end cameras to help illustrate what was going on for the viewer at home.
We used multiple cameras around a cricket picture if we stay on the theme of cricket to be able to identify a ball with the cameras running at several hundred frames per second in each image and then be able to triangulate that in a 3D space and then be able to use physics to be able to predict the trajectory of the ball.
As tech-enabled refereeing expanded and became more popular with broadcasters, Hawkeye and other companies liked them.
started offering tools to help spot a wider range of infractions, like line calls in tennis and offsides in football.
And spectators now had the information used by umpires.
The downside, which even Ben acknowledged, was that the use of VAR often slows down the game.
There has been delays to the game and there is a big effort on speeding the game up, but actually there's been some quite subtle changes in behaviour that's created, like fewer career-ending injuries.
The thing that you're always trying to trade off of these things is speed, accuracy and engagement.
And it's very difficult to maximise all three of those simultaneously.
But even if it's difficult to maximise all three goals simultaneously, Ben says that Hawkeye and the correct decisions it makes can really enhance the game for fans.
And a really great example of that, actually, that I always come back to is Federer versus Nadal.
The famous, much-commented-on rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
Ben is talking in particular about the 2007 Wimbledon final.
Federer had a line call overturned by Hawkeye.
It's a challenge.
And without that technology in that moment, Nadal would have won in three straight sets.
And the match ends on a controversial call and that becomes the story.
And so we made that call.
Federer went on to win the match.
And the story became how amazing that match was and it went five sets.
controversy disappears and everyone gets to experience what is one of the greatest kind of sporting finals in history.
There might be some frustrations from fans about video assistant refereeing, but what Ben is saying is that without Hawkeye, this incredible match, what some consider the greatest tennis match of all time, would never have happened.
So Hawkeye is firmly established in some of the largest sporting events in the world, not just in the way games are officiated, but also in terms of entertainment.
As the technology has evolved, The company has been exploring new ways to use the massive amounts of data it collects from every match it covers.
We're tracking balls, we're tracking players, we're tracking skeletons on players.
We'll be tracking 22 players and the three officials, all 29 points on their skeleton 50 times a second, which ultimately turns out roughly 2 million data points for every football match that we track.
And Ben is hoping that all that data can change the way that fans watch and engage with sport.
For example, Hawkeye now takes those skeletal data points and uses them as the basis to animate new experiences for fans.
We're able to convert that data into the right structure and format to be able to overlay cartoon characters or whatever IP might be appropriate.
So for the NFL, we've overlaid The Simpsons.
That allows us to produce a secondary fieve of any live sporting event in real time as an alternative to the traditional linear broadcast.
cater to specific demographics like children.
We might have a touchdown where Homer Simpson is sprinting away and because they've hit 25 miles an hour sprint speed or whatever it might be, they've got fire coming out their backside.
Kids love that.
It's a completely different way of experiencing American football.
Could you theoretically then superimpose yourself on an NBA game?
I upload my likeness and suddenly I'm...
Scoring three pointers for the New York Knicks.
Absolutely.
Look, I think there'll be two applications of that.
I think you'll have a world where you can create your own avatar and that'll come pretty soon.
Starting that journey actually from an elite perspective at the World Cup this year where there will be photorealistic avatars that are overlaid as part of the offside replays, which will be, I think, a world first.
So, fans angry about VAR calls and Homer Simpson running around with fire coming out of his backside.
But I don't doubt that Ben has a serious point here.
The technology used for VAR was designed, more than anything, for spectator enjoyment.
And that's what a lot of people in the industry believe, that technology does have a real potential to make sport just more fun to watch.
Barney Francis is Chief Business Officer at Sports Marketing Agency IMG and something of a guru when it comes to live sports broadcasts.
I asked him what he thought about the future of fan engagement.
We talked a lot about personalization.
You know, are we going to get to a point where sport that I get to consume on whatever screen is exactly how I want it?
It's favoring the team I support.
It is hearing from commentators I want.
It's telling me the data streams that are relevant to me because I might be engaged at the same time in conversations with friends who are also watching, or it might be relating to...
betting that I might be placing or anything.
So in many ways, we are in the personalization era.
How long is it going to take us for sport to be able to be consumed that way?
Barney is confident that no matter what, the way we consume sports will evolve radically in the coming years.
All these camera angles and data could help generate new formats and new ways to consume sport.
You just have to look outside of the Western markets to understand what the future might look like.
For a subset, so a group of youngish people in China, there's an obsession with three-minute dramas.
That's what's really winning a consumption battle right now, is three-minute dramas.
We need to talk to rights holders and broadcasters about creating three-minute dramas out of sport.
In China, these fast-paced, high-suspense formats are changing the way people consume video content on social media.
You know, also in China, Social platforms are becoming broadcast distributors and retailers all at once.
So there are platforms like Doyin and Red Note acquiring sports rights directly.
And then they're having integrated subscriptions, which allows amazing fan engagement, allows e-commerce, and it's all into one sort of simple system.
Just like cartoon avatars running around the pitch, the idea of watching sports with integrated online shopping might sound ludicrous to diehard football fans.
And sometimes radical attempts to engage fans do fall flat.
Like a few years ago, when the sports industry expected fans to embrace VR headsets like Apple's Vision Pro that would allow them to watch a game at home as if they were inside the stadium.
When the early versions of Vision Pro glasses were around...
Everybody was toying with, if I'm not at Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park, can I sit and put on specialised goggles and glasses and effectively watch the game from my seat?
The demand, the commercialisation of that, will of course be the challenge.
It proved a flop.
Fans didn't go for it.
Which takes us back to the question, when does tech get in the way of sport rather than enhance it?
Nowhere is that question more hotly debated than when it comes to the world of gambling.
More on that after the break.
all with GIST.
Learn more at gist.ai.
So we've talked about how new technology is harvesting vast amounts of data from every cricket, football and tennis match.
That information is being used to help referees make decisions and spice up the viewing experiences for fans.
But there's also a third way that data from companies like Hawkeye is being taken up.
After being passed on to sports leagues and broadcasters, it's then sold on to the gambling industry.
The data on metrics like ball speed, distances run or player positioning is employed by bookmakers.
More data means more things to bet on, just as online sports betting explodes on both sides of the Atlantic.
Darren McGee is an associate professor at the University of Bath and the author of Imitation Game, How Gambling Hijacked Sports.
If you're looking for a technological advancement within sport that is...
genuinely global, then yeah, I think it's very difficult to argue with the idea that in-play betting or micro-betting in particular is arguably the single most profound transformation of sport in a kind of technologically advanced era.
The way people bet on sports started to change in the early 2000s during the dot-com bubble.
Before that time, sports betting had been pretty rudimentary.
If you consider the relationship between gambling and sport before the turn of the century, in essence, most bets on sport in that age were indeed bets on the result of a game or indeed kind of something that was very low latency in data terms like the first goal scorer, something that's easy to measure, easy to aggregate.
We would place a bet on the result of a game and then get on with the business of fandom.
All of that changes with the advent of one product, in-play betting.
otherwise known in North America as micro betting.
Micro betting or in-play betting is when you bet on events that happen within a game.
It is the ability to process data on yellow cards, red cards, the next free kick, the number of corner kicks in a half of a soccer game, for instance.
There are all kinds of small events in a game that you can now bet on, often in combination with each other.
And these in-play odds weren't being offered by betting companies until they had the data they needed to properly assess the chances.
By knowing the speed of a baseball pitch, for example, you can have a good sense of the odds that a pitch will end up as a home run.
And if you're confident about the odds, you can offer gamblers the chance to bet on those odds.
Or, on a parlay, betting on a combination of events happening in games or across games across increasingly complex probabilities.
What happens is a single sporting event, a game at the World Cup to consider an event on at the moment, is suddenly carved up from being one or two or three gambling markets into hundreds, if not thousands of micro events.
That is only made possible through the processing and analyzing of real-time data, in essence, aggregating every aspect of every game.
And as these companies look for ever more in-play events to offer odds on.
The next phase, Dara says, will come from the kind of skeletal tracking and other biometric data being collected by companies like Hawkeye.
Undoubtedly, the new frontier of the industry using kind of real-time data aggregation and AI is indeed the use of biometric data.
This idea that we can get to an even more granular level in our understanding of athletes, for instance.
The number of sprints, the velocity of serves, I'm thinking of tennis in particular, I'm thinking of baseball, the possibilities of biometric level kind of data aggregation in real time just carves up more and more of sport for new gambling markets.
The impacts of this can be found first and foremost in the way we talk about sport.
One bit of terminology you might see pop up on World Cup broadcast these days is XG.
which stands for expected goals.
It's a number devised by statisticians that represents how many goals a team should have scored at any given point in a game.
Though now widely referred to by football fans, it gained traction as a gambling term.
Not the actual times that the ball has gone into the net, but an assessment of probabilities.
XG becomes perhaps the most popularly adopted term within that, this idea that...
performance outcomes may not be connected to the more granular performance of your team.
And something I've recounted many times myself is the first time I sat among other friends and wanted a reference point for the performance of one of my favorite players.
And I found myself sitting in a local pub referring to a heat map of kind of one of Manchester United's players.
And I remember checking myself in that moment and thinking, wow, this is indicative of...
how technology, how the availability and aggregation of data alters fan vocabulary.
Last year in the US, $165 billion was bet on sports matches.
That's more than what Americans spent on books, movie tickets and music combined.
It's also 12 times the amount spent on sports betting in 2019.
Dara says this tech-enabled betting is changing what it means to be a fan.
It locks fans into a relationship with live, immersive, kind of dramatic sport.
It overlays that with, in essence, the rhythms and reward mechanisms of a casino.
They could even be in the stadium watching the game while also logged into a gambling app with hundreds of opportunities to bet in real time.
And there's a real sense that for a new generation of fans, in-play betting becomes this default accompaniment to consuming the game.
And of course, This amplifies and adds a sense of jeopardy to every single action of every single game in a way that undoubtedly alters what fandom is.
And a lot of fans, of course, end up kind of being somewhat denatured to the normal rhythms of fandom in the sense that every single aspect of every game is suddenly a new opportunity for a bet.
The betting industry might say that they're just giving fans what they want.
The issue, Dara says.
Is the data asymmetry between fans and betting companies?
Bookmakers have a massive edge.
They're able to kind of crunch the numbers in real time and I guess have them clean to a point where they can use very sophisticated predictive modeling on every aspect of every game and indeed every market they're offering to fans and how those markets are priced in the moment.
The discrepancy between what the old school bookmaker had and what the fan has at their disposal.
has grown, the chasm has grown further and further.
And of course, they also have this kind of understanding of fan interaction and their behavioural patterns.
I've had so many fans tell me over the years that I can't imagine walking into a betting shop and placing, you know, five, let alone 10, 20, 50 bets in a short period of time.
But I don't think twice about doing it on my smartphone.
Not only do bookmakers have more on-field data than the average spectator does.
They're also able to use customer data to push fans towards bets through targeted advertising.
Today, gambling companies are among the biggest sponsors of football teams and are fully embedded in sports, which takes us back to the Scottish team Hearts we heard about at the start of the show.
Hearts part owner, Tony Bloom, made his money as a gambler, first poker and then as a very successful sports bettor.
working with a big firm and using his mastery of sports analytics to make profitable bets.
He's since directed those same analytics towards helping teams like Hearts.
He becomes this, so many ways, symbolic of the blurring of the lines between sport and gambling over the last two decades, but also the pioneering use of data therein and kind of the blurring of the lines between the data brokerage firms, gambling and sport today.
This blurring of the lines is what we might call the new ecosystem of sports data.
Flowing up from the pitch through to sports tech companies, broadcasters and then betting companies, all while that same data is being used by teams and coaches themselves.
Does this really enhance fans' enjoyment of sports?
There are plenty of people who say VAR and gambling is ruining the experience.
But sports marketers and tech companies...
are always looking for innovative ways to engage a new generation of fans and secure the long-term future of sport itself.
But what happens when you try to engage new fans by throwing the rulebook out altogether?
It is the 2026 Enhanced Games.
Tonight, strength will be measured, speed will be tested, and human potential will be redefined.
Earlier this year, the Enhanced Games premiered in Las Vegas.
with juiced-up athletes competing to break world records.
Is this the future of athletic competition?
That's next time on Tectonic.
This season of Tectonic is hosted by me, Josh Noble.
Josh Gabbard-Doyon is the producer.
Senior producer, Edwin Lane.
Topher Forges is executive producer.
Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner.
Theme tune by Metaphor Music.
Special thanks to David Shepard and Florian Muller.
Flo Phillips is Head of Audio.
Tune back in next week for the final episode in our series.
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