This case study was written in cooperation with Metabase and their Analytics Engineer Thomas Schmidt. Metabase is an open-source, easy-to-use, self-service Business Intelligence tool for internal and customer-facing, embedded analytics that makes data work for everyone.
Metabase creationLaunched as an open-source project almost a decade ago, Metabase was formed as a solution born out of frustration with stuffy enterprise software and the false hope of self-service analytics.
Metabase has raised $30M in funding and now supports over 60,000 teams to get answers independently, no matter their data proficiency. Metabase makes self-service analytics actually happen for whole teams, regardless of data proficiency.
Here at Metabase, we like to explore data. From time to time, we find a dataset, analyse it, create a dashboard in Metabase, and share it with our community. This time was no exception. As the UEFA EURO 2024 championship was in full swing, we wanted to find a reliable data provider to build a real-time monitoring dashboard.
We had some requirements that we used to compare different providers:
The sales process from other providers (e.g., for specific functionality like event coordinates) mostly made us abandon them (since we were short on time, as mentioned above). On the contrary, with Sportmonks, we could quickly prototype something with the API and the free plan before deciding to switch to the EURO 2024 tournament.
Data should be available “near” real-time
It should be easy to work with (good API)
No big sales process needed (since were short on time while the start of the tournament was approaching)
There should be some more special data than just standings. We were also looking for something where we could visualise ball heatmaps or from where goals were scored. Eventually, Sportmonks did not 100% fulfil our requirements, but the pressure index was nice, and the ball coordinates were better than nothing – even though we were very unhappy with the documentation (even after asking via email).
We did some research on the web on sports data providers (especially football) with data on the EURO 2024. We then chose Sportmonks for:
I think the “include” parameter makes it quite flexible. It seems the API is more tailored towards application use cases where you request information needed for page X. However, in our case we needed something more like an ELT approach where we load all the data and model it in our database. That worked reasonably well with the “include” and “per_page” parameter. Without it, we might have needed a lot more API requests.
It was generally easy to work with it. Sometimes, the documentation was very good, and it was a bit confusing in other situations. Things work quite well after you get behind the “include” logic. If I remember correctly, there were some cases where I wished for better filtering.
We use Standings, Statistics, Odds, Topscorers and Squads from Sportmonks for the European Championship 2024.
Very good. They always did what they could and helped us very fast.
Yes – we could build a dashboard on top of the data, plus we got some good feedback.
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