Cases/06 · Productisation

GSEG — Global Sports Entertainment GroupClient

GSEG.Pioneering data science in daily fantasy sports.

Daily fantasy sports·Data science productisation·Practitioner: Simon

Global Sports Entertainment Group (GSEG) built a turn-key second-screen entertainment platform for the daily fantasy sports market — a market dominated in the US by FanDuel and DraftKings, both valued at billions of dollars. Daily fantasy sports runs in short cycles: users draft new lineups for each day's matches and compete against other players, with the analytical engine sitting at the heart of the experience.

Eight mobile screens from GSEG's OurGame deployment in Asia, showing Premier League contest entry, draft progression, prize-pool breakdowns, live match states, and a leaderboard, all in Chinese-language UI.
Live OurGame deployment in Asia · the platform localised end-to-end for a different fantasy-sports market

Challenge

A platform of this kind lives or dies on the analytical core — the engine driving player rankings, scoring, and decision support. Whoever has the better analytics has the better product. The challenge was going up against incumbents valued in the billions, with the engineering and capital depth to match. The analytical core had to be genuinely better than theirs.

What was done

Analytical techniques were pioneered that outperformed FanDuel's and DraftKings' on the core of the product — the engine driving player rankings, scoring, and decision support. The platform was designed and built around that analytical advantage: product, technical foundation, and the commercial case for an under-capitalised challenger going up against incumbents in the billions. Superior product-market fit was achieved in a market the incumbents thought was theirs to lose. Delivery ran across a team of 14 specialists in the UK, US, China, Ukraine, and Denmark.

GSEG draft player selection screen on mobile: 'Draft Players 3/5' with Premier League player cards (Rondon Gimenez Jose Salomon, Armel Zaha Dazet Wilfried, Austin Charlie, Benteke Liolo Christian, Da Silva Costa Diego, De Bruyne Kevin), MVP and role badges in the left rail, countdown timer 06:45:10, draft buttons.
Draft Players · the analytical core surfaces role-shaped player picks per slot, ranked by the proprietary scoring engine. The visible UI is a thin layer over a deep ranking model.

Outcome

Turn-key SaaS implemented with OurGame, a Beijing-based media partner with 550M+ customers across Asia.

2M+ GBP

Series A secured; total investment from US and British investors

Beat a competitor with a 4B-USD valuation to win the Asia partnership.

Practitioner

Simon — Data science, Product strategy, Commercial case.

Where this fits

This case maps to 'Our data could be new revenue. We don't know what to build.'Data science productised into a B2B SaaS — built to win against incumbents with hundreds of times more capital, and designed around a commercial structure that turned the analytical advantage into market traction. The engagement was an Implementation — building the technical core, the product, and the commercial case in parallel.

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