UEFA Euro 2024 Germany

Case study
Metabase

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 creation
UEFA Euro 2024 Germany

WHAT IS Metabase trying to achieve?

Launched 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.

What was your idea/problem when you were looking for a data provider?

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.

How did your search for a data provider go?

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.

speed icon

Data should be available “near” real-time

coding languages icon

It should be easy to work with (good API)

time efficiency icon

No big sales process needed (since were short on time while the start of the tournament was approaching)

Data collection

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).

Why did you decide Sportmonks should be your provider?

We did some research on the web on sports data providers (especially football) with data on the EURO 2024. We then chose Sportmonks for:

  • Quick possibility for prototyping with the free plan (to see whether it is what we need)
  • Self-serve speeded up the process for us
  • Pricing was comparable
  • Good and super quick support with some initial questions regarding credit card change, etc.

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.

Thomas Schmidt - Analytics Engineer at Metabase

Was it easy/difficult to start with our API?

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.

What data features from Sportmonks are you using?

We use Standings, Statistics, Odds, Topscorers and Squads from Sportmonks for the European Championship 2024.

How do you experience working with Sportmonks?

  • Very fast and helpful support (except for the ball-coordinates question)
  • Reasonably well-documented API
  • Fast prototyping even before choosing a paid plan since you can use the free one to test things first

How would you rate Sportmonks’ customer support?

Very good. They always did what they could and helped us very fast.

Did our API enable you to achieve your goals and raise the bar?

Yes – we could build a dashboard on top of the data, plus we got some good feedback.

Have you ever experienced problems?

  • I initially added my private credit card for testing some advanced features in the trial. After switching to the paid plan, I wanted to add our company credit card, but it somehow kept my personal one. Support was very helpful and refunded things such that I could easily switch the cards without a problem 👍
  • We wanted to double-check whether we can share parts of the data that we modelled on top of yours with an audience for a webinar and code-along. That question was answered super fast.
  • We could not get behind the logic of ball coordinates, which theoretically makes them useless (e.g., what are X and Y and where on the pitch this would refer). Support could not help here, but we made some assumptions and used the data in the assumed way.

INSPIRED AND READY TO CREATE YOUR OWN APP?

You can contact our support team for more information, or you can investigate our API for free by registering to My.Sportmonks and trying our forever free plan. You can also test one of our default or custom plans with our 14-day free trial.