Sky Sports & Fourfourtwo Sign With Transfer Predictor

17 May 2016 | tshego

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Sky Sports and FourFourTwo.com have become media partners with Football Whispers, a new digital platform that predicts football transfers.

Sky Sports will be utilising the ‘Unique Index Score’ technology in transfer related content on Sky Sports digital platforms, with Football Whispers working in conjunction with FourFourTwo.com on a new rumours section.

According to Football Whispers, the platform uses a complex algorithm that can predict the likelihood of multi-million pound football transfers taking place. Rumoured football transfers are given a ‘Unique Index Score’ on a scale of 1 to 5 as an indication of how likely a transfer is to happen – the higher the number calculated the more likely the player is to move clubs.

Using multiple data points, the algorithm looks at the volume of conversation (chatter), the authority of the sources and how recent the story was, as well as a host of other factors.

Sky Sports head of digital content, Mark Alford said: “We’re looking forward to our users interacting with Football Whispers technology within our hugely popular transfer centre product. All us football fans love a good transfer story.”

The technology behind the platform has been developed in collaboration with The University of Sheffield, Department of Computer Science. During the website’s trial period for the January transfer window, it saw 100,000 users in four weeks and proved its index system by verifying rumours such as Henry Saivet to Newcastle United three days before other mainstream UK media outlets picked up the rumour, and two weeks before the rumour became a reality when Saivet signed for Newcastle United.

Dr. Mo Sacoor, Football Whispers’ founder and chairman said: “We are really excited and proud to provide football fans around the globe with the world’s first transfer predictor, Football Whispers. After months of planning and development we believe that Football Whispers is a resource that will enhance a football fan’s online experience – providing fans with a regular source of transfer rumours and much wanted football news, all in one place. We have ambitious plans to continually develop the technology, capabilities and offering available to Football Whispers users that will allow football fans to stay close to teams and their players at all times.”

Fabio Ciravegna, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Sheffield, added: “Attempting to predict the validity of football rumours is no easy feat, but as a result of this close partnership we have helped create an innovation that is able to sift through hundreds of millions of data items on both the web and social media, to turn the whispers into a transfer prediction score! Our method combines large-scale text processing, machine learning, data science and visual analytics with a large scale architecture.”