The social media side of Framesports is the part people find by accident. A match comes back analysed, someone clicks through the left-hand menu, and there is a written report, three graphics and a handful of highlight videos already sitting there for it. This post explains what those are, where they come from, and how much of them you control. It is the mechanics; how to turn stats into social content is the advice.
Everything starts when the analysis finishes
Nothing here is drafted from the raw video. The moment a match’s analysis is completed, three jobs run for the team that owns the match: a match report is written, three graphics are built, and highlight videos are assembled. Each one reads the tagged events, the tries, tackles, carries, set pieces and kicks the analysis produced, and nothing else. A match with no analysis has no report, and a report can only say what the tagging supports.
The match report is written from the events, and it never states the score
Under Match Reports you get a written piece for each analysed match, a few hundred words in the style of a newspaper report. It is drafted automatically, and the drafting works under strict rules. Every fact has to come from the match data: the try timeline, the player stats, the team comparison, the recent results against that opponent. It is not allowed to invent a name, a minute or a statistic, and it is told to leave the score out entirely, so a report describes how the match went rather than what it finished. Numbers appear as counts and fractions, “made fourteen tackles” and “won six of seven lineouts”, never as percentages.
You can make one yourself too, from the New Match Report button: pick the match, pick a writing style from five (professional, analytical, dramatic, conversational or editorial), tick any sponsors you want mentioned, and it is drafted while you watch. Change the match, the style or the sponsors and it is drafted again. Edit the words directly and the edits are saved as you type, without a redraft. Governing-body accounts get a neutral report that covers both sides rather than one written from your team’s point of view.
The graphics are three of your match’s best numbers, in your colours
Under Graphics, each analysed match arrives with three ready-made images. The system looks at five team numbers for the match, tackle success, carry dominance, scrum success, lineout success and how often a visit to the 22 became a score, works out which three you beat the opposition on by the most, and builds a graphic for each: one big stat, a side-by-side comparison of you against them, and a headline banner. A short caption with hashtags is written for each as well, ready to paste.
There are six templates in all. Besides those three there is a headline with your sponsors’ logos along the bottom, a two-column starting XV, and a full-time score card. Any of them can be made by hand from New Graphic, and every one exports at four sizes: square and portrait for a feed, story for a phone screen, and landscape for a link preview. Export renders the graphic in a real browser and hands you a PNG.
What makes them look like yours
The graphics take their look from Brand Settings. You set one primary colour, and the text is always white over it. You choose three fonts, one each for headlines, subheadings and body text, from Google Fonts or from a font file you upload. You add your logo in whatever variants you keep, and your sponsors, each with their own logo variants, so a sponsor can sit on a graphic in its white version over a photo and its colour version on a plain background.
The background is a photo. It comes from your own image library if you have added to it, and if you have not, a default rugby photo is used until you do. There is a photo search built in for finding new ones, and a graphic can be made without a background at all.
The highlight videos come from the same events
The third thing waiting after analysis is a set of video drafts, under Video Highlights: all of your tries in one landscape video, your first try on its own as a portrait short, your remaining tries as a second short, the best tackles, the lineouts you stole, and a personal highlights video for each of your three highest-scoring players in the match on the app’s player score. Each draft opens in the video editor with the clips already on the timeline, so what is left is trimming, a title and music. A draft only gets made when there is enough to fill it: a match with two tries gets the first-try short but not the all-tries video.
What to do with it
The trap is treating the automatic output as the finished post. It is a starting point built from tagged events, which means it is accurate and a little plain. The report reads better after a coach adds the two sentences only a coach knows. The graphic reads better with the one number your supporters care about, which is not always the one you beat the opposition on by the most. Ten minutes on a Sunday evening turns the drafts into a week of posts, and the case for making that a habit has been made before.
Set up the brand once, add the sponsors once, and every match from then on comes back with its own report, graphics and videos in your colours. The rest is deciding what to say.
Hero photo: quintinsmith_ip, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
