This is interesting for anybody with an interest in sports analytics.

Opta, the stats-gathering guys, have announced a partnership with AIG (the Very Big Insurance Company) under which AIG will make raw Opta rugby data available free of charge via the AIG Opta Rugby Dataset.

The catch? You have to enter a competition to create an app. Anyone who enters will get access to all of the New Zealand All Blacks match data from 2012 as well as some fixtures from the USA international team.

The really, really interesting bit is that this includes X/Y data.

X/Y data is spatial data, now being gathered across a host of sports from the NBA to MLB to rugby. In simple terms it’s the tracking of every moving part on the field – ball and players – on a continuous basis, many times per second. The difficulty in getting hold of it is that since it’s expensive to generate it’s usually restricted to teams or other organisations who have a contract with a data provider. I wrote a bit about X/Y data in a feature for the Irish Examiner on the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier on this year. This data being made available will include on-the-ball actions categorised and logged with an x/y coordinate attributed to where it took place on the pitch.

The competition winners will have access to Opta’s live international data feeds for two years. Oh, and there’s cash and prizes totalling $85,000.

Nice work.

More info on this as I get it.

-Updated 10:52am to clarify “on the ball actions”