E54: The Opta Story

Aidan Cooney is founder and CEO of InCrowd, the fan experience technology company and is probably best known as the guy who created and ran Opta, the world’s leading sports data business, which he sold to Perform Group in 2014.The story of Opta is the story of the rise of sports data, from a marginal, nerdy backwater to the billion dollar industry it is today. Aidan played a central role in this evolution and this is part of an occasional series of podcasts we’ve done that goes deep in to the history and future of sports tech. If you’re a new listener, you might want to go back to previous podcasts we’ve done with Oli Slipper, Andrew Croker and Sam Seddon, all of which tackle a similar theme.To help recall the key moments, we invited Simon Banoub along to InCrowd’s offices in London, Simon is a leading b2b sports marketer who worked with Aidan as the company's head of marketing. He’s a Middlesbrough fan, which makes two in a week, after Adrian Bevington’s Unofficial Partner debut on Tuesday.Stay safe and listen to podcasts.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.