Data in the Horse Industry Has Always Been About Who Matters

Datagate in this sport has eaten up the headlines of late. There's a lot of chatter and a lot of reference so there's little use of me going through it here. Crunk's summary of late, showing the, ahem, misinformation, has been as usual pretty solid. 

No matter how we feel about it, in my view, this is the way it always has been. 

I opened up the interweb today, and came across "PFF Pro". This is a stats and API package for the NFL season and it includes: 

• Proprietary statistics and 50+ new data points their DB people came up with
• A new interface where metrics are built into the "PPs". IOW, you can build custom PP's with ease. 
• Player pages, not unlike historical horse PP's, incorporating whole sets of new data
• Game views to handicap games, i.e. why did a team win. 
• An API, so all this data can be placed directly into any program you want. 
• A new AI tool, where you can ask the database a question, and it spits out an answer. In our sport this would be like typing in, well, pretty much anything you could think of about a horse in its current situation, and you'd get information back. 

The price? $24.95 a month. 

Meanwhile back at the ranch, we saw plenty of screen shots of "custom PP's" over the last month for one or two (or five or ten, who knows) people, but no one else. 

I looked into some harness data recently, and found out harness is not part of the Equibase plan, where one can get free data for testing purposes. Leaving aside I would not know what to do to make a CSV file actionable is not the point; the point being, even if I did know how, I'd be out some serious money. 

Now, most of us who do business understand some of this. 

Subscription based services or SAAS work on scale. The cost to create something is sunk, then over a certain point, each additional customer's marginal cost approaches zero. Things get built for a large market. 

Horse racing in 2026, as we all know, is not growing and the market for these products (unlike PFF's offering today) is small. Sinking money into something like this is usually a pretty bad business decision. 

But I think it's more than that. In racing's case, much more than that. 

Sinking money into ROI negative or loss leaders in horse racing is common. Everytime we see a purse of $25k and handle of $10k on the race it's happening and it's been going on forever. 

HISA itself probably proves the point. It's above my pay grade to analyze their systems and net worth per dollar of funding, but this place has a huge budget and from what we read, the whole vet database could be accessed by changing a horse ID number in a URL. Is this a professional enterprise?

The point is, this industry sinks a lot of money into a lot of things without worrying about if $1 going in is $1.01 coming back. 

It's never a KPI for them, it appears, unless when it comes to growing a customer base. 

When I sit here and debate questions about why a CAW can get data I don't have; why a team with millions in bank can get pricing I can't; why someone can access a database of vet work like they live in Hong Kong where everyone can see it and we can't. And yes, why a company like Pro Football Focus can create something so user-friendly and useful for $24.95 a month for everyone, I believe the answer to the questions are easier than I think. 

It's not about money - the sport has plenty of it from slot machines, and hell, HISA gets a reported $75M a year alone. It's not about people who don't care about us - many people in this sport clearly care and want to grow retail handle and the fan base. 

In my view, it's been, from day one, about who they deem matters. 

Distributing slot money to purses matters. Keeping the slot cash rolling by focusing on the politicians matters. Giving 5% win takeout and millisecond execution to a conglomerate in Australia that bets $500M a year matters.

Me and you who might want to ask a question to a database to get better at the game, or those of us who don't bet $500 million a year who want lower prices of our own? 

We don't matter today because it happens to be today. 

No. We don't matter because we never have. 

Have a nice Thursday everyone.