The ATP (Association of Professional Tennis Players), TDI (Tennis Data Innovations) and Sportradar have come together to launch Safe Sport. A new service to tackle online abuse targeting professional tennis players.
The collaboration breaks new ground by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) moderation, education and investigation into a single service to protect athletes.
Sportradar service available for the 250 best in the world
The new service will be available to the ATP’s top 250 singles players and the top 50 doubles players, free of charge and optionally, starting this month.
It combines AI technologies from Sportradar and its partner Arwen AI to analyze players’ social media channels. The goal is to find toxic and abusive comments, spam and bots in 29 languages.
Flagged comments are automatically hidden in real time, protecting players and their followers from exposure to offensive content.
Arwen currently processes 600,000 comments per day, protecting over 750 million followers worldwide across Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube and TikTok.
In parallel, Sportradar’s dedicated team of intelligence analysts will actively investigate threats and potential criminal comments to unmask those responsible, linking online activity to real-world consequences.
Players will also receive an educational program that will cover topics such as dealing with abuse, mitigating online risks and maintaining integrity on social media platforms.
Safe Sport is the ATP’s most comprehensive initiative to date to combat online abuse, a long-standing and prevalent problem in sport, and a key part of protecting player welfare.
Benefits of the partnership
Andrew Azzopardi, ATP Chief Safeguarding Officer, said: “The ATP is committed to protecting players and their well-being. This includes taking a proactive stance against online abuse, which has become a very important issue in the lives of modern athletes. We are grateful for TDI’s support and Sportradar’s expertise in making this happen.”
Matthew Ebden, ATP Player and Chairman of the Player Advisory Board, said: “Online abuse has become a real problem for many professional athletes, as well as many other people online in general, across the world. Safe Sport is a game-changer and was developed specifically to help solve this problem.”
Andreas Krannich, Executive Vice President of Sportradar Integrity Services, added: “This partnership is groundbreaking in sport as we are bringing together AI-driven self-moderation, education and investigative services for the first time.
Therefore, Safe Sport offers players better protection against online harm. This represents a significant step forward in protecting players’ physical and mental well-being, allowing them to focus on delivering their best performances.”
TDI and Sportradar began a partnership in early 2024. Thus, TDI provides:
- Sports technology global data
- Streaming Rights for Betting
- Media data rights for all ATP Tour and ATP Challenger Tour events.
Additionally, Sportradar provides:
- Integrity Services to protect these competitions against match-fixing and betting-related corruption
- Monitoring and addressing threats and risks to integrity through due diligence and support for investigations.