Sportradar

History

Sportradar started as Market Monitor, which was founded in 2000 in Trondheim, Norway, by Petter Fornæss and Tore Steinkjer. Market Monitor provided services for online bookmakers based on crawler technology developed as part of a thesis at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Market Monitor together with Austrian and German partners, created the product Betradar.com in 2001. Betradar.com provides a set of reporting and monitoring tools for the online betting markets. Carsten Koerl joined Market Monitor as a major investor, obtaining 51% of the shares. In 2007, Sportradar AG was founded by the owners of Market Monitor and served as a parent company for the various companies in the group. Market Monitor was renamed to Sportradar AS and became a subsidiary of Sportradar AG.

In 2012, Sportradar acquired the Slovenian development company Klika. Later the same year EQT acquired a minority stake by investing 44 million Euro in the company. Sportradar's expansions continued in 2013, with Sportradar became the majority shareholder of Usk-based Sportstat. Sportstat was the official data collection partner of http://www.insidermedia.com/insider/wales/87716-sportstat-merges-swiss-business/. In 2013 Sportradar also advanced into the US market by acquiring SportsData (now Sportradar US).

EQT reinvested in Sportradar in 2014 by EQT's flagship fund buying the shares of EQT's Capital Expansion II.

In 2015, Sportradar obtained exclusive distribution rights for NASCAR, NFL and NHL. The same year, Sportradar attracted investments from Michael Jordan and Mark Cuban led by Revolution LLC. National Football League also acquired equity in Sportradar US as part of the partnership.

In 2016, Sportradar acquired the core business of Sportman Media Holding, including Laola1.at and Laola1.tv. Later that year, NBA announced a multi-year partnership with Sportradar involving integrity services, data distribution and video streaming.

Sport integrity services

Sportradar provides federations and law enforcement agencies with a system for detecting betting related match fixing. These services are operated by Sportradar's Security Services division, with headquarters in London, England.

Sportradar's sport integrity services began with Early Warning System developed in 2005 following the Hoyzer scandal. The use of this system was one of the measures Bundesliga took to prevention further match fixing. The system was further developed to include live monitoring, and was relaunched in 2009 as Fraud Detection System (FDS). The development of FDS was done in cooperation with UEFA. Through this partnership, Sportradar monitors suspicious matches in the two top leagues of every UEFA member nation. FDS has since then expanded its partnerships to other sports and federations, including CONCACAF, FIBA, ESL and IOC. Sportradar has also signed agreements with several law enfocement agencies, most notably Europol and the Australian Federal Police.

Fraud Detection System works by comparing odds movement patterns from online bookmakers with the expected odds movement patterns for a given match. When suspicious matches are found, they are analyzed and then reported to the relevant federation. The federation can then start their own investigations. As of 2015, Fraud Detection System monitors 65 000 matches across 11 sports, half of them in soccer. Daily, the system receives roughly 5 billion odds adjustments from around 450 different bookmakers.

Since the launch of Fraud Detection System, Sportradar has been involved in several notable match fixing cases, such as the Nepal scandal in 2015, the Austrian case including Sanel Kuljić in 2013, and the Australian match fixing case in 2013. The system has indicated that since 2009, more than 2000 events has likely been manipulated.

In addition, Sportradar provides workshops for clubs and federations to educate them on the consequences of match fixing.

Sports content products

Sportradar provides sports content in various forms to media and bookmakers. The content is either collected by operations employed by Sportradar. Sportradar is a licensed distribution partner with several federations. Some of these partnerships include data collection by Sportradar operations. The solutions Sportradar provides includes white label hosted solutions such as statistics suits and in-game data visualisations, as well as server-to-server APIs and data feeds.

Sportradar's sports distribution covers more than 325 000 sport events and feeds clients like Google and Fox Sports. Sportradar also provides data to Facebook Sports Stadium.

Sports betting services

Through the brand Betradar, Sportradar provides bookmakers with a number of sports betting services. As of 2015, Sportradar has partnered with roughly 450 bookmakers including Bet365, William Hill, Paddy Power and Ladbrokes. The Sportradar services are also used by state lotteries such as Veikkaus, Svenska Spel and Norsk Tipping.

Sportradar create odds for thousands of games across 40 sports. The odds are created by feeding sports data collected by Sportradar into mathematical models. For in-game betting odds, this requires continuous recalculation of the outcomes using the live data that Sportradar collects or acquires through licenses. These odds are sold as odds suggestions to bookmakers for matches the bookmakers are unable to create their own odds for. Similarly, Sportradar provides information to bookmakers about when matches start and finish so they do not allow money being placed on matches that are finished. A subset of Sportradar's collected data goes through an extensive quality assurance process specialised for bet clearing.

Sportradar also provides market monitoring, which allows bookmakers to compare their odds with the rest of the market. Bookmakers have to provide their own odds to make use of this service, thus making their own odds a part of the comparison with other bookmakers. This service allows bookmakers to ensure they are not in an unwanted surebet situation.

Federation partnerships

Sportradar has partnered with several sports federations to collect or distribute sports data. For Handball-Bundesliga Sportradar both collects and distributes official data, while for the ITF, the umpire enters the data directly into the Sportradar systems. For NHL, Sportradar ingests and redistributes the data coming from NHL's tracking system. The partnerships with the US federations NASCAR, NHL and NFL are handled through the US subsidiary, Sportradar US, partly in order to avoid conflict of interest between the federation and Sportradar's involvement with the betting industry.

Distribution partnerships can also include creating official web and mobile solutions, as well as the rights to stream video content. Partnerships such as the one with ESL include using the data to expand Sportradar's betting services.

Under a deal signed in October 2015, Sportradar will provide The Football Association of Malaysia a platform for managing its federation. Through this platform, the federation will manage such things as schedules, leagues, and personnel such as players and referees. The tool also provides the means for collecting live data that can be distributed to teams and partners, or visualised in various web solutions.