IANAL. Statistics sound like a compilation of facts. Facts are not copyrightable by themselves. Compilations are, but compilation were not authored by players, but by someone else. I really hope they will lose. Also, paywall.
Same with your age, your gender, your height and weight, your address, your phone number, where you work, etc.
All could be either measured in public or are likely to already be in a public database somewhere.
Yet most would consider those to be personal information.
That information might not be private, but that doesn't make it any less personal.
It's akin to an employer now tracking 24/7 whether you are sat at your home office desk (in my view: this shouldn't be allowed, with or without permission).
Actually this sort of case could have quite far reaching implications. What other data would fall under similar protection? I can think of quite innocent use cases, like IMDB or other databases of who worked on artistic product like a book or game. If your name is in one, should you be paid? Where would this end?
GDPR clearly needs an exemption for anything that is already publicly available data.
Personal data doesn't just stop being personal data because it's someone else's.
If it's Opta, they record a whole bunch of stats for every player in every game in the top 4 (I think) leagues - distance run, passes attempted, passes completed, whether shots were on target, etc.
Even providing "how good was the shot?" metrics - https://www.optasports.com/services/analytics/advanced-metri...
Huge investment in tech and people. Definitely not "trivial".