DAZN stats & score
Designing the System Behind the Screen
DAZN-Uniting sports fans worldwide
DAZN is a global sports streaming platform, available in over 200 countries, offering live and on-demand coverage across football, combat sports, and hundreds of other competitions worldwide. It operates on a subscription model, holding territorial broadcast rights that vary market by market — from top-tier leagues to regional and lower-division competitions most other platforms don’t cover.
Brief
DAZN wanted to expand its service by adding a news and results layer that keeps the app relevant even in markets where it doesn’t hold streaming rights. The core scenario: a DAZN subscriber in the UK can’t watch the Premier League on DAZN — those rights sit with Sky — but they still want to follow their team. Without a reason to open the app, that user has no reason to stay engaged with DAZN at all.
The brief was to build a Stats & Score section that gives fans full team data, competition standings, and minute-by-minute match coverage — with the live stream included wherever DAZN holds the rights, and full statistical coverage regardless. So DAZN remains the place fans go to follow their team, whether or not it can broadcast that particular match.
Process
The starting point was a competitive benchmark of the leading scores apps on the market. The finding was clear: the information architecture was nearly identical across all of them — a de facto industry standard (match → competition → team). Rather than reinventing it, the decision was to adopt that standard and adapt it to DAZN’s specific needs.
Why adopt the standard, not copy it
There’s a UX principle behind this decision: Jakob’s Law (Jakob Nielsen) states that users spend most of their time on other products, so they prefer yours to work in a similar way to the ones they already know. Familiarity isn’t a shortfall — it’s a way of reducing cognitive load.
In a live sports data section, this matters more than in most products: the user arrives with a specific, urgent goal — checking the score, seeing who scored, checking the table — not to explore or learn a new system. Any friction in navigation competes directly with that goal.
That’s why the decision wasn’t to “innovate on architecture”, but to innovate exactly where it added real value: the sport → competition → team pattern was left untouched because it was already the user’s installed mental model. Innovation was reserved for what was specific to DAZN — territorial rights, data scale, scope — where no existing standard solved those problems, and where the decisions genuinely defined the product.
The opposite logic to differentiating for its own sake: spend originality where the business needs it, not where the user already knows the answer.
The problems behind the screen
Building DAZN Score meant designing around constraints that had nothing to do with visual design — territorial rights, hundreds of competitions with wildly different data quality, and a business goal that couldn’t get lost along the way. What follows are some of the challenges we ran into, and the decisions each one forced us to make.
Territorial streaming rights
DAZN’s streaming rights vary by country (the Premier League is available in Spain but not in the UK) creating two categories of matches living side by side in the same interface: with streaming and without it.
Solution: In the feed, a single card design is used for every match, with only the CTA changing (“Watch on DAZN” vs “Match info”). On the match detail page, where the content genuinely differs, the layout diverges: with streaming there’s an embedded video player and an Overview tab; without it, the page goes straight to the data.
Scaling to 400+ competitions
Covering that many competitions makes a flat list unmanageable, and multiplies the number of instances each component needs to support
Solution: Idesigning by system — each component checked against every real state it needed to support — plus quick-access shortcuts (favourites, top competitions, grouping by competition) to prioritise without endless scrolling.
Data variability depending on competition popularity
The Champions League can deliver granular detail — down to left-footed shots per team — while a lower-tier third division might only provide the final score.
Solution: the system adapts to the data it receives. If a data point will never arrive, the component is hidden. If it will arrive later (for example, once the match ends), an explicit “not yet available” state is shown instead.
Scope discipline
Research showed that scores apps typically include full player profiles. But DAZN Score isn’t a standalone scores app — it’s the scores section of a sports streaming app. Replicating that full standard risked turning it into a separate product, competing for attention with DAZN’s actual objective
Solution: the player profile was cut, prioritising everything that led the user back to the match.
A visual identity of its own
Competitors tend to have a highly structured, template-driven UI, agnostic of brand.
Solution: the section followed DAZN’s own UI strategy — elegant, easy to read and understand — instead of adopting the generic visual language of the category
Notifications — avoiding noise without losing relevance
With 400+ competitions and multiple event types per match (kick off, half time, full time, goals, cards), notifying users of everything would create spam, and users would simply switch notifications off altogether — losing the very engagement the feature was meant to build.
Solution: granularity by event type, not all-or-nothing. When following a competition or team, the user opens a “Personalise your alerts” screen and chooses exactly what to receive — event reminders, lineups, live updates, kick off, half time, full time, goals, red cards — each with its own toggle.he section followed DAZN’s own UI strategy — elegant, easy to read and understand — instead of adopting the generic visual language of the category
The MVP that convinced the board
This video was the MVP presentation delivered to DAZN’s board: a full walkthrough of everything the Score section can do, end to end. It’s the best way to see how the decisions covered in this case study — the rights-aware match feed, the three states of the fixture page, the filtering system, and the notification settings — come together in the real product experience.
Results and learnings
Post-MVP data analysis and user flow studies revealed a clear need: quick filtering by top competitions and favourites. That led to the row of competition chips above the calendar — varying by the user’s location, prioritising local leagues by region — and the chevron on each competition heading in the feed, linking straight to its competition page. Design didn’t stop at launch; it kept evolving with real usage evidence. Score’s metrics are seasonal — rising around finals and major tournaments, dropping when there are no matches in play — and always trail streaming metrics, as befits a supporting section. The metric that validates the project’s most important design decision: users who engaged with Score increased their post-match streaming minutes by roughly 40%. At peak moments such as the World Cup or major finals, the section reached 6 million weekly unique users.