Following the Northern Ireland Football League’s (NIFL) release of its schedules for the upcoming season, Twenty First Group is proud to announce a multi-year partnership with the NIFL. The partnership involves the NIFL deploying the ‘TFG Scheduler_’ product to devise its schedules for the Premiership, Championship, and Premier Intermediate divisions for the 2024-25, 2025-26, and 2026-27 seasons.  Ben Marlow, Chief Strategy Officer of TFG who leads much of our Competition Intelligence work said: 

‘Competition schedules are a key and often under-utilised lever for commercial growth for rights holders. The ‘TFG Scheduler_’ has been designed to cut through complexity and create schedules that adhere to often complex constraints while also optimising for commercial growth, all in a timely and cost effective way. We’re delighted that NIFL recognise this and have signed a multi-year partnership with us to optimise their schedules across its 3 divisions. For example, in previous years NIFL have had as many as 13 iterations in compiling their schedule, which we managed to reduce to two iterations before landing on a workable and optimised schedule.  I couldn’t be more happy that we’re putting this into practice with Steven and the NIFL”.

Speaking of the partnership, Steven Mills, the Chief Operating Officer of the NIFL said: 

‘As a League it is our priority to produce a balanced and equitable set of fixtures that consider both league requirements and a range of club specific constraints. This season we have worked in collaboration with Twenty First Group to enhance our schedule by using key data including previous results and rankings plus attendance and broadcast figures to develop schedules that maximise the chances of excitement and interest throughout the whole season. The support from the team at Twenty First Group has really helped us better understand our data and we are confident our supporters will benefit from the added value the ‘TFG Scheduler_’ has brought to our League.’ 

The TFG Scheduler_ has been developed to work across multiple sports and competition formats and is able to deliver bespoke, predictive scheduling solutions which respond to rightsholders’ unique requirements and constraints, including adapting schedules mid-season.  For competition organisers, the key benefits of the TFG Scheduler_ are:

• Multi-sport: can be deployed across all major sports
• Commercial value: allocates the best games and the best talent to the best time slots in order to maximise sporting excitement, viewership and attendances
• Bespoke: provides bespoke solutions which account for the unique characteristics and constraints of multiple sporting formats
• Predictive: future-facing technology allows rightsholders to predict and build schedules around the games and match-ups that matter, therefore minismining dead-rubbers and maximising sporting jeopardy
• Flexible: can be responsive to enforced changes (e.g. weather cancellations, match abandonments) during mid-season or mid-tournament
• Efficiency: delivers solutions in a timely and cost-effective manner