Sportradar (Nasdaq: SRAD), a self-described “global sports technology company focused on creating immersive experiences for sports fans and bettors,” has posted a 17 percent increase in annual revenues to a record €1.29 billion, with €100 million in profit (up 7.8%).
The company introduced a share buyback plan a year ago and has since raised the total authorization to €1 billion. As of Feb. 27, 2026, the company has repurchased 9.2 million shares for a total of $171 million.
About Sportradar
The company’s business lies in two segments. Betting Technology & Solutions – which feeds odds, risk-management tools and live data to sportsbooks – generates about four-fifths of company revenue. In FY25 that amounted to €1.05 billion, up 15 percent year-on-year. Sports Content, Technology & Services – broadcast data, integrity services and performance analytics – generated €243 million, up 22 percent.
Sportradar was founded, as Market Monitor, in 2001 in Trondheim, Norway, by Petter Fornæss and Tore Steinkjer, creators of a program to extract betting odds from online bookmakers. Its CEO since the founding, Carsten Koerl, was himself the founder of an online betting company, Betandwin Interactive Entertainment, which was folded into the company. Koerl acquired a 51 percent stake in Market Monitor’s founding year. The company was renamed Sportradar in about 2007 and went public in 2021, at a valuation of $8 billion. It is now headquartered in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and maintains about 29 offices in 20 countries.
IMG Arena acquisition
International Management Group (IMG) was founded in 1960 to represent golfers but has since become one of the world’s largest agencies for sports rights and media. It has been part of Endeavor Group for years. In 2012 IMG established IMG Arena, a division specializing in the data rights of sports betting.
IMG Arena proceeded to amass data rights for some 70 entities, among them Wimbledon, the US Open, Roland-Garros, the PGA Tour, MLS and EuroLeague. Sportradar completed its acquisition of IMG Arena last November, extending its data coverage to more than one million matches annually. IMG Arena’s contribution to this portfolio amounts to approximately 38,000 official data events and 29,000 streaming events across 14 global sports on six continents.
Sportradar has paid nothing for this. Rather, the seller will be paying 103 million US dollars to Sportradar over the next two years. (The seller has also made $100 million in cash prepayments to certain sports rightsholders.) The company therefore expects the acquisition to be “accretive” to adjusted EBITDA margins and free cash flow conversion and to accelerate revenue, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow growth.
By the time of the acquisition IMG Arena had already lost to Sportradar – in 2024 – its rights pertaining to the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). In fact, Sportradar CEO Koerl cited this to argue for the deal. “We managed this property significantly better [than IMG Arena],” Sportico reported him as saying. “And that is given the scale, which we have. We have 800 bookmakers. We have 900 media companies connected to this machine. And this is a well-oiled machine; we are global … and we simply have the leverage on this.”
The baseball deal
A deal extended with Major League Baseball (MLB) in February of last year illustrates two of the company’s likely priorities: expansion in the US and investment in AI. Under the new terms of the deal (signed originally in 2014), Sportradar has become the exclusive distributor of MLB’s ultra-low latency official data (MLB Statcast included) as well as of its media and audiovisual content – whose interest extends beyond the US and Canada to Latin America and Asia. This, in combination with “the increasing legalization of sports betting,” presents an opportunity, as the company has explained.
In addition, MLB took a small equity stake in Sportradar.
