These are football players playing matches in public and the statistics are trivial I imagine, like how many passes they make and stuff like that, no? This seems like they just want free money and I hope they lose
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?
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".
GDPR clearly needs an exemption for anything that is already publicly available data.