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Chapter 4

Client feedback: The Olympique de Marseille data lab

The French football club Olympique de Marseille (OM) launched a digital transformation project in January 2019, aiming to accelerate innovation and provide them with a new technological platform to achieve its sporting and business goals.

After taking over the commercial operation of the stadium, OM found that its IT infrastructure did not factor in either the challenges or potential usefulness of its data. The club envisioned how its new tech ecosystem could act as a catalyst for OM’s business and sporting development, ensuring data was at the heart of this strategy.

The club spent 18 months redesigning the entire information system, from website, mobile application and accounting to CRM, commercial management and HR tools. At the same time, the scope for data as a development lever was promoted internally. The aim was to make quicker and better decisions, improve sales and find new opportunities.

The club built a data lake, designed as the foundation to build further projects. Furthermore, to foster innovation and identify new opportunities for their data, OM brought in external partner support and combined several existing data-related initiatives within an innovation laboratory; the Data Lab.

This lab allowed them to bring together partners, startups, engineering schools, researchers, companies such as AWS and Devoteam A Cloud to develop joint innovation projects. For example, optimising the filling of the stadium using ML models which leveraged on the stadium’s historical sales data.

OM also had big expectations from Machine Learning and video detection to help them improve the way they identify young football talent. The club therefore grouped these internal initiatives within the lab to find partners to support these areas, with data as the common thread.

To see the resuts and how the AWS cloud work as a data support for the Olympique de Marseille
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