Live in-play football alerts: what to watch while the match is on

Why in-play is a different problem

Before kickoff you have all evening to read a fixture. Once it starts, the thing you are reading changes every minute and so does the price attached to it. A player on two fouls inside twenty minutes is a different proposition from the same player at kickoff.

That is the whole case for an alert. You are not being asked to watch faster; you are describing the situation once, in advance, and handing the watching to something that does not get bored. The DataPitch line for it is on the page itself: do not chase the match, watch the situation.

The situations worth an alert

Three are set up for you on the alerts page, and each card on that page is the alert itself, exactly as it lands in Telegram. They are built from the live match data, and each one names its own conditions in plain words rather than in a rule language.

• He has fouled early. A player with at least two fouls inside the first twenty minutes of play who has not been booked yet, pointing at the market on him being booked, and only while the price is at least 3.00.
• The favourite is chasing. A midfielder or attacker with at least two shots inside the first forty-five minutes who has not scored, whose side was the favourite before kick-off and is now behind by a goal or more, pointing at the market on him scoring.
• He is peppering the goal. A midfielder or attacker with at least three shots inside forty-five minutes and at most one of them on target, pointing at the market on him having a shot on target.

Each card also carries what that rule has done before: how many times it fired in the finished matches we hold and how often the thing it watches for followed. Those are counting and not a forecast, they are labelled as historical results on the card itself, and a rule has to have fired at least thirty times before it is given a number at all.

How a DataPitch alert works

Arming one is a tap. That opens a chat with DataPitch in Telegram, Telegram shows a START button, and one press makes your rule live. There is no app to install and no account to create: /mine lists the alerts you have running and /stop removes one.

From there it runs off the same data the live boardreads. The board refreshes every two minutes from the match data, and an alert fires on the refresh that first meets your rule. That is also the honest limit of it: our read on a player can sit up to two minutes behind his counts, and the board prints a stamp saying when it last moved.

An alert only ever points at a market we hold a real-time price for. The card names the market and shows the latest price we hold for it, labelled by source. Where we hold no live price there is no alert to send.

Building your own rule

The builder is three steps and every one of them arrives with an answer already chosen, so an alert can be armed without touching any of it. Step one is what you are watching: the market the alert points at, from the ones we hold real-time odds for, with the count and the minute you want. Set the count and the page tells you what that rule has done before.

Step two is filters, all optional. Each one you add makes the alert fire less often, and each arrives with the DataPitch number already in it. Step three is where to watch and a preview of the exact card you will receive; by default it opens on the next game to kick off, which is the quickest route to a first alert without noise.

If you would rather watch than be told, the live board is the same data laid out as a page: every match in play, read player by player, with a "Worth a look now" panel holding the radar's tier A and B names and the substitutes we are watching, across every match in play.

What an alert is not

It is not advice and it is not a tip. An alert says a situation you described has happened and shows the market price attached to it; what that is worth is your call. DataPitch publishes data and modelling on football markets, and DataPitch does not take bets.

It is also not a forecast dressed as a count. The numbers on each card are what that rule did in the finished matches we hold, nothing more, and the card says so under every one of them. Both football products are free, with nothing to pay for and nothing to sign up to.