Case study

Enabling Player Data for the National Rugby League

Sakura Sky built a Google Cloud data platform for the National Rugby League that brings player statistics, data, and dashboards together for the league and for each club.
Results
  • Production data pipeline for player statistics on Google Cloud
  • Player data from 2013 onwards in the same platform
  • Dashboards for the league and for each club
Customer
National Rugby League (NRL)
Years
to

The National Rugby League (NRL) runs the professional rugby league competition in Australia and New Zealand. Its player data came from several places, in different formats: CSV files, JSON from the Catapult API, team lists in XML, STATS data in a Microsoft SQL database, and data from other APIs.

From 2019, Sakura Sky built the NRL a single data platform on Google Cloud, in stages. Today this kind of work is part of our Data & AI practice.

What we did

Stage 1: player statistics (October 2019). A Google Cloud certified data engineer and a Google Cloud certified architect built a production-ready environment and a tested, production-ready data pipeline for player statistics, using Google Cloud services including Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Dataprep, and BigQuery.

Stage 2: club data (February 2020). We brought further player data, going back to 2013, into the platform, together with the reports the 16 clubs send in batches. We joined it with the player and match statistics already in the platform, and built dashboards in Data Studio:

  • a league-wide dashboard for the NRL;
  • a dashboard for each club, showing its own data against league-wide trends. Each club can only see its own data.

Stage 3: club portal (October 2020). A serverless web portal where clubs enter their data directly, with a daily sync into BigQuery and exports in CSV, XML, and JSON.

Outcomes

  • One Google Cloud platform for the NRL’s player data.
  • Reporting for the league and for every club, built on that platform.

If your data comes from many sources and many teams, contact us.