World-Leading Football League, LaLiga, Leads Decision Making with Power BI

LaLiga is home to some of the best football players and teams in the world. The organization is comprised of LaLiga Santander’s 20 football clubs, LaLiga SmartBank’s 22 football clubs, and is responsible for the organization and management of professional football competitions in Spain. Beyond being one of the best football leagues in the world, LaLiga has grown into multinational digital entertainment company with an ecosystem made up of 600 employees in more than 41 countries, reaching more than 90 markets. 

Less than a decade ago, LaLiga first began as a small, traditional football association with fewer than 70 employees. Over the past 10 years, LaLiga has seen tremendous, unprecedented growth in their organization. Due to the accelerated pace of growth, the league found themselves with copious amounts of data but no unified way to manage and utilize all the information. 

Three pillars have supported the growth of LaLiga over the last decade: a commitment to data and Business Intelligence, a “glocal” (global + local) growth strategy, and a commitment to digital entertainment/OTT models. LaLiga is committed to applying technology to every process in the value chain such as internal management processes, financial control, digital strategy, and television broadcasting. To help reach their technology-based goals, LaLiga has created the technological subsidiary LaLiga Tech, which brings together products and services that have been developed in-house.

To keep up with LaLiga’s rapid growth, they needed a solid technological structure that could effectively support their rapid speed of development and easily adapt to continuous change. As a result, the President’s office at LaLiga proposed the shift towards data-driven business decision making and the digitalization of the organization. 

Finding the right tool to create a data driven organization

Building from the ground up, LaLiga started evaluating BI tools to support data-driven business decision making across their organization. Football generates trillions of data points a year, and LaLiga had to find a system that could support massive workloads, provide flexible environments to allow for adaptation, and overall provide a low total cost of ownership. 

After an exhaustive evaluation process, LaLiga chose Power BI as their business intelligence platform. Power BI ticked all the boxes as it can securely scale up and down dynamically, handle petabyte-scale data requirements, and minimize total cost of ownership at scale for the organization. Power BI also enabled LaLiga to create customized solutions from scratch, providing the flexible platform and tools required to create reports and dashboards that fit the organization’s unique needs. 

LaLiga’s existing relationship with Microsoft was a key component throughout the migration process. Not only did Microsoft help LaLiga evaluate what products would be the best fit, Microsoft also offered ample support during migration to enable the organization to get up and running quickly and help LaLiga develop a clear vison on how Microsoft tools can help LaLiga fans have a better, more personalized experience. 

LaLiga’s Azure technology stack is orchestrated through Azure Data Factory where data is divided into two branches of execution and persistence: small data and big data. Small data is executed on the Kubernetes platform and maintained in Azure SQL. Big data is executed through Azure Databricks and maintained through parquet tables in Azure Data Lake. Data processing is handled through Azure Storage, and then pushed into Power BI and featured in over 140 different dashboards. 

Leveraging Power BI to improve fan experiences and fantasy football

Fan 360

Understanding fans and their needs can help fans feel more connected to the content they are consuming. Fan360 is one of the main subsets of data at LaLiga and represents user behavior within LaLiga’s collection of digital assets. Fan360 data combines multiple disparate data sources to generate a 360-view of the users, helping LaLiga offer more personalized experiences. This data is then integrated with Salesforce to optimize digital marketing campaigns and provide a customized user experience. 

Fan 360 data is fed into a Power BI dashboard that displays extensive information about users. The LaLiga Customer team then utilizes this dashboard to facilitate analysis and decision making. User personas are driven through fan life cycles to simulate how a user might interact with LaLiga content and what content certain users gravitate towards. Because of Power BI, the Customer team at LaLiga can understand consumer behavior and feed content that is specifically curated towards an individual’s preferred engagement. 

LaLiga SportsTV

LaLiga SportsTV is a platform LaLiga created in 2019 to give users a single place to watch live content for football, basketball, handball, futsal, and more. To manage LaLiga SportsTV data and help digital strategy initiatives, LaLiga Tech created the LaLiga OTT dashboard. The OTT dashboard provides a visualization of aggregated user registration data to highlight various user personas and their behaviors, alongside insights into what type of sports are the most consumed. This data-first approach helps LaLiga make user-focused decisions and improve recommendations so LaLiga Sports TV users can quickly find the matches and content of the teams they love. 

The audience dashboard serves as a centralized place to retrieve TV consumption data and national audience data from various audience measurement companies and broadcasters. Now audience data is centralized, and users can work with the data quickly to make important decisions. The dashboard is viewed and used weekly by many teams within LaLiga. 

Fantasy Football

Many football fans enjoy testing their player and management knowledge through playing fantasy football, a game where users serve as owners and managers of virtual football teams. Using LaLiga’s official fantasy football game, The LaLiga Fantasy App, users can select players from across the league and build teams to compete against their friends. Fantasy football is data heavy, constantly referencing and tracking player and game statistics. To better understand this data, the LaLiga Fantasy team consolidated a view of all the fantasy football data into one comprehensible dashboard in Power BI. 

The dashboard is divided into five specific report categories: 

• Fantasy generic
• Fantasy specific
• Fantasy monetization 
• Fantasy support
• Fantasy users

With the fantasy football dashboard, the Fantasy team can view analytics relating to user demographics, type of leagues users participates in, favorite teams, player usage and tactical schemes, and more. Alongside user demographics, the dashboard also collects information on downloads, competitor metrics, devices, and user feedback. All these metrics facilitate decision-making on new features and app updates while also giving the team insight into data monitoring and usage. 

Growing Power BI Adoption through Education

With the introduction of a new reporting tool, LaLiga implemented a center of excellence (CoE) to educate users.  As part of the CoE, LaLiga hosts a Power BI workshop for internal stakeholders every time a new dashboard is created. Mandatory Power BI workshops help ease the learning curve and allow users to feel more comfortable with new dashboards and reports. When users have specific questions, they’re able to easily consult LaLiga Tech’s BI department, that has its own support system and a direct line of contact with Microsoft to help handle high-priority issues. 

The implementation of Azure and Power BI has enabled LaLiga to wrangle their massive amounts of data into a shape that drives informed decision making. LaLiga can work more efficiently by rapidly sharing information and streamlining decision making at all levels. Dashboards enable more effective time management by presenting data in dynamic visualizations for easy reference. Since the solution is built out via Azure infrastructure, LaLiga can ensure all their data is contained within a secure environment that meets all the necessary compliance and confidentiality requirements. The management, overhead, and high price point of physical servers is no longer a concern with their cloud-first Azure adoption. 

As LaLiga Tech completes the migration process to Azure and Power BI, they are striving to grow their reporting and analytics platform. LaLiga Tech will continue to develop innovative projects that provide football metrics to fans and make the experience of supporting their favorite teams even better. With Azure and Power BI, LaLiga is taking football and the fan experience to the next level.  

Read the Spanish press release about this story here.