Setting Post Title via Meta Data returns Auto-draft

As soon as you hit “Add New” and the new post pages starts to load, WordPress inserts a mostly blank post template into the database. Periodically after that you get auto-saves. You don’t want either. You will need to add additional conditions to prevent your code from running in those circumstances. Something like this in addition to your $data['post_type'] == 'matches' && $data['post_title'] == '':

if (
  (defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE) 
  || (defined('DOING_AJAX') && DOING_AJAX)
  || ($p->post_status === 'auto-draft')
) {

Personally, I think you’d be better off hooking into a different, more specialize hook, like publish_post or a post status transition hook.

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