Note: this post ended up in my drafts and should have been posted during the European Championship, sorry :)

Statistics are wonderful and the web as a central mechanism to connect databases creates a great mechanism to share and interact with data.

One great example of statistics is the Castrol Performance Index. For this European Championship the Castrol Index distributes all the games data live on the web. You can immediately see which player played where and how they are doing.

You can compare players, ball possession, shots on goals and more. All this information is live during the game. The exciting part of these kind of websites is that they add something to television that only the web can add. It doesn’t make it more interactive, but it does give it more information depth.

Suddenly the game that looks so simple gets a new layer of data and statistics. I didn’t know that for example the Dutch goalkeeper van der Sar already ran over 1300 meters in the first 34 minutes. Did you know that most of the players run around 10 kilometers during a game.

I can see that players that should be attacking spend most of their time on the wrong part of the field. This information adds context to the video footage, and it is context only interactive media can add. I don’t have to see this data all the time, I can just open it when I’m interested in how the players are doing.

I don’t know if this is what interactive television should be, but I really like how this is adding an extra dimension to live footage.

See also this earlier example by the Dutch Broadcaster NOS