this have been tried for Chess, and deemed not applicable. Others are allowed to do live coverage of the moves without purchasing any rights. The organizers control the live footage, can ban them from entering the premises to interview players etc., so most will adhere to some form of contract. But if you have no ties there's nothing stopping you from making your own content based on purely the moves being made.
Update: Specifically, the moves are not copyrightable https://chess24.com/en/read/news/us-judge-agrees-with-chess2...
It also mentions "NBA vs. Motorola" in which NBA didn't own statistics of NBA games and others were allowed to use them.
It's been done.[1] Not for American football, for soccer.
[1] https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/soccer/soccer_on_yo...
Unless you're getting the raw video stream from all the cameras, it'll be transformed through the producer and director's creative control and that, I suspect, would block you from doing this - it's not longer just "facts", it's a particular interpretation of those "facts" (cf bare recounting of historical events vs someone's book covering the same, I suppose.
I don’t know about that. You’re using the directors production to establish the fact but once you have extruded those facts, it could be argued in principal of not legally that this is a new creative work based off the mere facts.
Consider an analogy to classical music - Beethoven's 5th isn't copyrighted but a particular expression of it by an orchestra can be.
The underdogs here are the consumers, who ultimately wind up paying all those hundreds of millions.
Of course they are, that's the entire business model of data analytics companies - the customers are:
- clubs and national teams themselves (e.g. German national team coaches Klinsmann and Löw were famous for early adopting data-driven training)
- sports betting services, casinos and similar enterprises
- TV and radio stations so that the commenters can (at an instant) pull facts like "player xyz has a 80% successful pass rate over the last 30 games"
This stuff is called "soccer analytics", the (German) Wikipedia has a decent article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soccer_Analytics
OTOH, I think the argument is very weak. First, precedent is strongly against the players here. Player stats have never been licensed to my knowledge. It's not clear if this is for lack of trying, or if the market for that data used to be superfans, and it was too small to matter.
That said, in any argument I tend to side with the underdog. I think it would be great if Athletic voluntarily shared some of their revenue with players! It would be a good move for them, because it would take wind out of the sails of the counter-parties, and it wouldn't acknowledge the players right to their data, except tacitly.