Sports bodies have spent the past decade collecting extraordinary amounts of data about athletes … while remaining oddly unclear about who actually owns it. 

The European Union’s Data Act is about to sharpen that question considerably. This matters because the rulebook governing performance data, one of sport’s fastest growing commercial assets, is about to change. 

At first glance the regulation looks like a piece of digital housekeeping; manufacturers of connected devices must allow the users of those devices to access the data they generate and share it with others. In most industries that will be a simple compliance exercise. But not in sport.   

In 2023 we (The STA Group) hosted a closed industry discussion on athlete data ownership; is it the athletes, those who collect it or those who pay to have it harvested? It was legally, morally and logically fascinating – the questions, once raised, were all obvious but which were right? The room was evenly split before the conversation began. Two hours later it was still evenly split, with half the room changing their minds along the way. 

That tells you everything you need to know about the issue. 

Athletes generate the data; clubs pay for the technology; federations govern the sport; certain sponsors might have a commercial interest; broadcasters and bookies can enrich the fan experience. However, no one is exactly rushing to deal with the legal elephant in the room. 

With sportspeople tracked, monitored and evaluated at every turn, including while they sleep, there is an extraordinary volume of information available. However, the tech has outstripped governance, again, and the issue of ownership has never properly been resolved.  

Underlying data has been known to remain locked inside proprietary systems and more than one club has invested heavily in technology only to discover that exporting raw data, combining it with other sources or analysing it elsewhere is far harder than expected. 

The Data Act challenges that model directly. 

Teams will have the right to access the data produced by the devices they use and to share that information with third parties. In practical terms a club could export tracking data from one provider and analyse it using independent sports science software rather than remaining tied to a single ecosystem. 

For sports organizations this increases leverage; data that once sat inside vendor platforms becomes something clubs can organize, combine and analyse on their own terms. For technology companies the implications are less comfortable as closed ecosystems will need to evolve. 

The deeper debate has not gone away and it still has not yet been determined where the ultimate rights to athlete data should sit. The EU has simply ensured that the argument will now take place in a more open arena. 

Sport has become very good at collecting data. It is about to discover whether it is equally good at governing it.