Supplying Data for Online Sports Betting: Data Scouts and Expanded Extractivism
Abstract
Online sports betting platforms offer an infinite number of live matches, of all kinds of sports, categories, and places in the world, allowing recurring and simultaneous bets on the matches. To supply this market with data, specialized companies produce fast, detailed and reliable live databases. Data scouts are professionals trained to generate data feeds from stadiums with specific mobile applications. We carried out an ethnography with a group of data scouts in Brazil, in dialogue with social studies on online sports betting and digital work in platform capitalism. Compared to other platform workers, data scouts are considered privileged due to their high remuneration (payments in euros) and valued affective space (sports, especially soccer). Without competitive tensions, we find cooperative dynamics between them. Data scouts are fundamental pieces in chains of expanded extractivism with better conditions than other workers in platform capitalism.
Keywords
Sports betting, Economic Sociology, Labour, Digital platforms, Expanded extractivismReferences
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