BACKGROUND
Liiga is the official national ice hockey league of Finland, with 15 teams participating in the season 2019–2020. The league has more than 400 games and attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators (at the rinks and via television broadcast) every season.
Veikkaus is a Finnish betting company offering different types of betting, gambling and lotteries. One of Veikkaus’ popular product types is sports betting, especially live betting for ice hockey. Veikkaus and Liiga have been partners for many years.
CHALLENGE
Both Liiga and Veikkaus are always looking for innovative solutions to better engage direct parties, players, coaches, and audiences in each game. Real-time statistics are a great way to enhance their experiences.
However, in ice hockey, getting real-time statistics is particularly difficult because players and pucks move at lightning speed. Liiga needed to find a solution that could provide extremely accurate real-time data, withstand high-impact collisions and still be easy and cost-efficient to maintain.
SOLUTION
Liiga chose Wisehockey, a leading Finnish sports analytics platform developed by Bitwise, as the solution provider to bring the ice hockey experience to the next level. Wisehockey provides a real-time tracking system for ice hockey arenas. They installed Quuppa Locators on the ceiling above the rink and placed trackable tags in player shirts and inside the pucks. The installed tracking system was set up to send real-time data directly and continuously to the Wisehockey system for instant analysis.
This way, the location of each player and puck is updated continuously. The Wisehockey solution is based on Quuppa’s robust and accurate technology. Wisehockey can now provide immediate, automated and accurate statistics regarding the speed, the movement of both players and pucks, the performance and the heart rate of each player in the game.
RESULTS
Wisehockey’s location-based solution has satisfied multiple stakeholders:
- The players get objective and real-time insights into their strengths and development areas.
- The coaches detect problematic situations and react immediately to improve their team’s performance during the games.
- The fans engage better with the games and their teams via real-time interactions.
- The broadcasting company gets more views thanks to the more engaging content.
- The betting companies can provide live data for game betting and develop new types of betting.
- The league organisers can improve the general experience of the whole league due to the better performance of teams, higher engagement of fans and increased interest from betting companies.
We get an almost real-time visualization to support the live betting. That creates better customer experience when it comes to Finnish ice hockey.
Sami Kauhanen, Betting Vice President, Veikkaus Oy
NEXT STEPS
Next, Liiga and its partners will further develop the solution and create new services for a better fan experience. Liiga will start using the data and analytics more widely in coaching and player self-evaluation. Veikkaus will most likely introduce brand new types of betting products soon.
