Opta Analyst has applied for membership in the Associated Press Sports Editors, beginning a 10-day comment period for the general membership before the APSE executive committee reviews the application. Here is the application from Editor-in-Chief Kevin Chroust.
A two-sentence description of your site:
Opta Analyst is a data-centric sports platform that advances fan engagement by turning statistics into accessible, engaging and interactive storytelling for soccer and leading U.S. sports. We work in tandem with a team of data scientists to create differentiated outputs, and our staff of data journalists and visualization experts transform numbers into unique insights through sharp editorial, predictive models and advanced stat pages.
A by-the-numbers description of your organization’s reach — unique visitors per month, other relevant metrics:
Unique monthly visitors: ~950,000 with considerable spikes around major soccer tournaments.
Largest share of direct audience by country: 1. 25-37% U.S.-based audience, depending on the month; 2. 20-30% U.K.-based audience, depending on the month.
Our brand’s overall monthly reach is considerably higher due to the popularity of our predictive models, mostly in soccer. We consider ourselves a small publisher with outsized reach because so much of our impact on sports storytelling is reflected in where our content is cited. We’re not traditional news, and we don’t aim to be. Instead, we bookend it. We began in 2021 by reacting to stories in a way few others could. Now, increasingly, we’re the ones driving them, especially through our predictive outputs. On average, we are cited in publications with a combined monthly reach of about 830 million users spanning BBC Sport, Marca, The Guardian, NBC Sports, L’Équipe and far more.
Social media followers: ~700,000
A two-sentence description of why you want to join:
We are working to better establish ourselves among the sports journalism spheres in both the United States and United Kingdom, and we feel to do so we should aim to be a leading source of data journalism within the APSE community. Our participation and recognition to date has mostly come in the U.K. (winners of Specialist Website of the Year at the Future of Media Awards 2025, shortlisted for Digital Publisher of the Year and Specialist Sports Publisher at the Sports Journalism Awards 2024), though we were finalists for a SABR award earlier this year and would find ways for our U.S.-based staff to get involved with APSE.
One additional note on how we believe we fit among modern sports journalism:
Technology is changing journalism, and not always for the better. A key difference in our approach to journalism in a new age, compared to recent industry trends, is where in the content creation process we believe the role of technology should sit. Our view is AI should advance human storytelling, not replace it. That’s why we invest in technology that can create new sources within content rather than the content itself. We leave all the writing to the humans.
