Between every kick, touchdown, beer purchase and social media upload at an NFL game, terabytes of data are being processed to keep the fan and team experience smooth, from inside the stadium to TV screens worldwide.
An NFL game can generate as much as 4 terabytes of data, including video streams, player-tracking telemetry, real-time analytics and operational feeds. Together with the humans that mind them, these data run stadiums, supply chains and global broadcast networks.
“The world runs on data, even in an industry as physical as sports,” says Gabie Noko, chief marketing officer at NetApp, the data infrastructure company that serves as the NFL’s official intelligent data infrastructure partner.
“Optimizing data for innovation isn’t just about where the data lives, but also how it moves.”
A stadium-sized data center
Take Super Bowl LX. Levi’s Stadium is one of the most data-intensive facilities in the country. And according to Costa Kladianos, executive vice president and head of technology at the San Francisco 49ers, the infrastructure requirements extend well beyond scoreboard statistics.
“High-performance storage is a critical part of our data operations, enabling us to do everything from powering the largest outdoor 4K display in the NFL to tracking our retail and concessions inventory in real time,” Kladianos says.
Grant Caley, solutions director for the U.K. and Ireland at NetApp, describes the company’s role as providing not just storage but an abstraction layer that connects data silos across multiple franchises, stadiums and media divisions.
“We store data; that’s the base layer of what we do,” Caley says. “But then we layer intelligent data capability on top of that. Cyber resilience, ransomware detection and protection, data classification and optimization, analytics acceleration for AI workloads.”
“It’s about breaking down the silos of where data is stored, connecting them together, and then building services on top to enable people to get a much better experience out of the data they’re already having to store anyway.”
Caley points to how enhancing fan experience goes as deep as learning their behavior by the minute, just as they do the players on the field: “If there’s a really successful run, does that trigger a run on burgers and beer?”
“It’s the ability to take real-time gameplay stats and operational data together to enhance the experience. It makes everything flow so much easier.”
Player tracking: The next generation of statistics
While NetApp provides the storage layer, it is Zebra Technologies, through its MotionWorks Sport platform, that generates some of the raw data making modern NFL broadcasts so statistically rich.
The company has been embedding ultra-wideband RFID tags in player shoulder pads since 2014, producing granular location and movement data for every player on the field, on every play, throughout every game of the season.
“The old statistics, when I was a kid, would have been: a running back got the ball 10 times and ran for 50 yards,” says Matt Seltz, senior director of business operations at Zebra Technologies.
“Now I can see what those runs actually looked like. He might have run 100 yards on the field to gain those 50. He might have made 10 people miss who were very close to him. All of the data gives more context to what’s actually happening on the field.”
The platform, known as Next Gen Stats, is a partnership between Zebra, Amazon Web Services and Wilson Sporting Goods, with the NFL’s own statistics team.
AWS handles cloud processing and AI analysis; the NFL manages downstream distribution to broadcast partners including NBC and Amazon; Zebra supplies the real-time player tracking that feeds the entire system.
At Super Bowl LX, analysts used Next Gen Stats to illustrate offensive-line pressure patterns in real time, identifying that one lineman had been beaten 10 times in a single quarter, with nine near-sacks, even though the box score recorded only one official sack.
“That doesn’t show up in a traditional statistic,” Seltz says. “You could kind of feel it if you were watching as a fan. Then they showed you the graphics, and they could highlight how one team was imposing its will on the other and why that was probably going to turn against New England if the situation didn’t change. And it kind of played out that way.”
The game’s many stoppages turn out to be well-suited to data-rich broadcasting. “The NFL has that advantage because of the stoppages between plays,” Caley notes. “It gives the broadcaster the ability to deliver some of these capabilities to their fans while they’re watching.”
Going global: Data as an expansion strategy
The NFL’s international ambitions have accelerated since it began staging games in London in 2007. What started as a single annual game at Wembley has grown into a multicontinent slate: the league played a record seven international games in 2025, and has nine confirmed for 2026 across London (x3), Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Munich, Paris and Rio.
“The NFL has been rapidly expanding its international presence over the last season,” says Gary Brantley, senior vice president and chief information officer at the NFL. “Data is a key component of reaching more people around the world with high-quality interactions.”
Both companies see data-driven storytelling as critical to building audiences unfamiliar with the sport’s complex rulebook.
“The rules, if you’re not familiar with them, are hard to understand at times,” Seltz acknowledges. “What Next Gen Stats do is tell a story. That storytelling can happen on a broadcast. It paints a picture for a new fan that might otherwise have taken years to develop.”
Cybersecurity: Protecting a very public target
The same visibility that makes NFL games commercially valuable also makes them an attractive target for bad actors.
NetApp’s approach involves what Caley describes as an “onion” model: layered perimeter defenses, identity and access controls, and then, at the core, real-time detection built directly into the storage platform itself. The key differentiator, he argues, is the speed of recovery rather than detection alone.
“Most traditional organizations, if they detect an attack, have to go back to a backup from a day ago, a week ago,” Caley says. “We’re talking about checkpoints measured in minutes so you can detect the attack quickly, protect against it quickly and recover from a point very close to real time.”
Beyond sport: The enterprise parallel
Before working with the NFL, Zebra’s tracking technology had already been deployed in manufacturing, retail and logistics.
“We’re tracking a player all the time, and putting events on top of that data to produce insights,” Seltz says.
“If you move that to retail, you take RFID and you’re tagging inventory. You can start asking: is it on the sales floor? Did a customer take it to a fitting room? Did it go past the register? Did it go out the door without a transaction? You get insights from that — a theft problem, a sizing problem, a display problem. All of those things.”
NetApp draws a parallel with its work in Formula One, where it sponsors the Aston Martin team. The requirements map closely onto the NFL model: real-time data capture at trackside, transmission to design centers and the incorporation of external feeds such as weather data and tire performance models.
“They are enterprises, really,” Caley says of sports organizations. “They’re just serving a different kind of audience. The challenges are about breaking down silos of data, gaining performance access so you can actually do something with it and then layering data protection and cybersecurity on top. It doesn’t change.”
For Seltz, who has spent more than 25 years in RFID, the current moment feels like a convergence. “AI engines are only as good as the data you feed them,” he says. “We’ve been doing this for 10 years in the NFL. We have 10 years of historical game data. We can run those through models. Time creates data. Data creates opportunities for patterns. And those patterns can be turned into something.”