Slade leads £500m lawsuit over bookies’ use of sports stars’ performance data

AFTER more than 25 years prowling the touchlines of English football’s lower leagues, Russell Slade has traded tracksuits for lawsuits to lead a claim against the giants of the betting and gaming industries and the alleged illegal misuse of performance data.

Slade has managed and coached at 13 clubs, including Cardiff, Grimsby and Leyton Orient, where he helped England captain Harry Kane launch his career as a teenager on loan from Tottenham. Since working as a managerial consultant at Stevenage in 2020, however, 61-year-old Slade has devoted his time to a crusade to ensure footballers — and professional athletes in all sports — regain control of the data routinely collected to measure and improve performance and often sold-on for profit without their consent. Already described as football’s biggest legal challenge since the Bosman ruling transformed the transfer system, the case is gathering momentum. Legal letters of intent were sent out this week on behalf of more than 1,400 professional footballers around the country, claiming £400-500million in damages based on the profits made by betting, gaming and data processing companies ompanies using their data.

‘People are making ng millions out of these ese footballers who have rights under UK legislation,’ Slade (right) told Sportsmail. ‘Companies are abusing these rights and players need to get back control. We think we have a strong case.’ Under existing UKK data protection law, personalersonal data belongs to the individual and not the companies collecting it. Companies licensed by the Premier League, the EFL and the SPL, and invited by clubs to install the various gadgetry to collect information about the players’ performance, should not be selling it on for profit. Some clearly are.

Slade and his partners at Global Sports data and Technology (GSdT) say they have tracked data passed through as many as nine companies.

Usually, it ends up in the multi-billion pound gambling and gaming industries. There it is enhanced by the companies’ own refined data collection operations, with numbers recorded by people inside stadiums or watching on TV and crunched by highly-paid mathematicians.

EA Sports, the US company who have made billions from the hugely successful FIFA series of video games, employ thousands of people around the world to supplement the data they acquire from licensed sources and pour it into algorithms to improve the gaming experience. Without it, all the footballing avatars would do the same thing, move at the same speed, pass and shoot with the same accuracy and tackle with the same success rate. Betting syndicates will channel a mass of data through algorithms, making calculations in seconds to perfect the odds. ‘if you can make a two per cent difference on a market worth £400m on a Saturday, that’s £8m,’ says Jason dunlop, a data expert at GSdT with a background in cyber-security. ‘The scale of the processing is massive and so advanced. it’s Googlesque. One betting company will have more data scientists than the whole of the Premier League.’

Slade found most sportsmen and women, and their employers (the clubs), to be unaware that their personal data made the wheels of these industries turn. Enlightened, they have objected on various grounds. One of the most common was an ethical standpoint, especially where gambling is concerned. Slade’s Project Red Card cacampaignpag embraceseb all sports, including cricket. many of the wworld’s biggest crickcricket stars are of stricstrict muslim faith, devdevoutly opposed to gambling and ununhappy to find ththeir data sold to fuel the inindustry. Others hahave been ununhappy about inacinaccuracies. SomSome knew their heightheights and weights were wrongwro online. Some even thatth their dates of birth were wrong. ‘Attitude is a category that often upsets players,’ says Slade but, beyond that, who defines a high-intensity run? What is a missed chance? What represents an assist? Are all measurements equal?

How can tactical instruction be factored into measurements such as distance covered in a game when one full back is under orders to sit tight and another is encouraged to tear up and down the wing for the whole match.

This drifts into scouting, now heavily reliant on data.

‘it could be the difference between a player getting a big move or not,’ says Slade. A realistic solution to the legal tangle would be for the athletes to decide individually if they want to consent to their data being processed and if so by whom. Then, for them to be paid accordingly.

‘We feel a responsibility to sort this out,’ says dunlop. ‘it feels wrong because many professional athletes, many of whom are not on mega salaries driving Ferraris, are not getting a fair slice of the cake.

‘in this instance, we believe the law is on their side and if they mobilise their rights they can change it.’