NEW YORK — It edged onto the North American scene a few years ago with a wealth of data technologies and a history in sports betting. Since then, Sportradar has doubled down on the U.S., growing the country into its largest geographic market, while expanding its tentacles to the major leagues.
In its most comprehensive deal to date, Sportradar will become the official data collector and distributor of the NBA this season, helping the league better manage data generated by teams to optimize player performance and enhance the fan experience.
Sportradar has positioned itself as one of the most important technology companies in the sports industry at a time when the digitization of sports is accelerating. It helps to make sense of the treasure trove of data that athletes, teams and leagues now produce on an everyday basis.
In an exclusive interview with SportTechie, Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl said efforts to grow and transform professional sports leagues, college athletics and amateur leagues, as well as the broadcasters, media companies, fantasy sports operators and betting houses that rely on its data technology, are ramping up.
In Sportradar’s Manhattan office, which is quickly becoming one of the company’s most important outposts of its global fleet of offices (it’s headquartered in Switzerland), Koerl discussed how the company is gearing up to play in the big-stakes sports-tech market in the U.S. and abroad.
The U.S. Will Remain Target No. 1
Sportradar first entered the U.S. market in 2013 and has since worked its way up to the NFL, NHL and NBA. Koerl, who studied informatics and played sports growing up, said expanding to the U.S. was a “natural fit” for the company, not only for its professional sports, but also because it’s a hub of innovation.
In 2015, the company signed three major sports deal in the U.S. The NASCAR partnership included sending live timing and scoring data to third-party digital outlets. The NFL deal, inked a few months later, positioned Sportradar as the exclusive distributor of official real-time scores, player statistics and play-by-play data to digital outlets. Later that year, it became the exclusive third-party data distributor of the NHL.
In the second half of 2016, Sportradar signed its biggest and most comprehensive U.S. deal yet, a six-year multifaceted data distribution partnership with the NBA that is set to kick off this season.
The NBA is especially attractive to Sportradar’s already established European markets and to China, where the company just recently opened up shop. But Koerl says it’s a prerogative to remain laser-focused on the U.S., even as Sportradar expands to new geographic markets.
“The U.S. is the biggest market for us and that was always a dream for me to say,” he said. “This is something for which I really want to explore.”
The Million-Dollar NBA Deal
In the NBA’s reported $250 million data deal, which also includes player-tracking analysis from Second Spectrum, Sportradar was named the “official provider of real-time NBA league statistics” starting with the 2016-17 season.
Sportradar will provide league data worldwide, including audio-visual game feeds, to media outlets, broadcasters, fans and betting houses in Europe, where sports gambling is legal. Its integrity protection measures will monitor global NBA betting activity and trends as well.
The sweet spot of this deal for Sportradar, according to Koerl, is figuring out meaningful ways to interpret the data being produced by athletes and how to put it to work. With the NBA partnership, this will come in the form of visualization, with products tailored to various stakeholders.
“What you need to find is meaning in the tracking data,” Koerl said. “What’s a pick and roll? What’s interesting from shot probability and how can you use the sensoric data plus the data which is collected from scouts to come up with a new product?”
Right now in the sports industry there are several players providing mechanisms to track data, mostly in the form of wearables. The next development is figuring how to interpret the data, which Sportradar does through algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Together, those tools enable software systems to “see things” that humans might miss, Koerl said.
“There is a correlation between weather and match results, you won’t believe,” he said. “But you can do it if you have all of that information available to compare it and make an engaging product for the fans.”
The first wave of Sportradar’s products will provide basic visualization of this data that end users ultimately view on their mobile devices or desktops through broadcast, social and mobile feeds. Other products will be provided to users as actionable tools by their fantasy leagues. The idea is to enrich these feeds with powerful player and league data in an effort to keep fans engaged.
“It’s about generating traffic and generating engagement,” Koerl said.
The next wave of products would be building out this data into virtual reality systems, chatbots or something more interactive, he said.
Fantasy An Appetizer To Sports Betting
The key component of Sportradar’s business is that it can provide real-time data quickly. Its data has a 0.8 to 1 second delay, which means that its game and athlete analysis is getting into the hands of end users faster than ever.
The problem in the U.S., according to Koerl, is that consumers don’t really know what to do with that kind of speed. They may use data to make changes to their fantasy teams, but the speed might not be as advantageous to them as might, say, someone who is betting in real-time on games like one would on a horse race. Betting houses in Europe, where sports gambling is legal, use it to help their clients make smarter decisions faster than their competition.
“If I give you the information about a touchdown 20 seconds before you see it on TV, you’ll learn that this is nice information to have,” Koerl said.
Sportradar’s business in the fantasy market is similar to its European betting business in that respect: both are about probability and using algorithms to predict potential outcomes.
Sportradar has been testing these algorithms across more than 40 sports to determine the best way to precisely predict potential match outcomes, which has positioned it well for sports betting in the U.S., should it become more widely legalized. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has been among the most outspoken about his support of legal sports betting in the U.S.
“We think we are very good at this and we think this opens a new business opportunity if we’re looking to the fantasy market,” Koerl said. “We’re very heavily developing products and tools for the fantasy player, helping them to improve the game.”
China To Be ‘Identical’ To U.S.
In July, Sportradar announced a major deal with Beitai Digital, a Chinese sports data and content company, to bring its extensive suite of sports data to China.
The deal includes Chinese digital broadcasters, such as Tencent, Sina, Sohu, Hupu and Bytedance, as well as national TV broadcaster CCTV-5.
While Koerl called this a “very normal market development,” and reiterated his commitment to the U.S., he also said that China is shaping up to be a very important sports market for Sportradar that could one day mirror the U.S.
“If you look now to market size, China is for our sport information data and technology a much smaller market at the moment than the U.S. I’d say it’s only a tenth of the US market volume for our products and for what we’re doing,” he said. “But China is picking up very fast and the market size is shockingly big. If you have the right partners on board, China has really a huge potential to scale up in the future. That’s what we believe will happen.”
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China has its own major leagues for basketball (Chinese Basketball Association) and soccer (Chinese Football Association), which are sports that Sportradar already has associations with in other major markets, such as the U.S.
The NBA also has a strong fan base in China, which will play into Sportradar’s NBA data deal. Koerl said Sportradar is “getting very close” to potentially striking a deal with the Chinese Basketball Association as well. It should also benefit from Beitai’s close relationship with the Chinese Football Association.
“It’s a qualified guess to say in five years, that market sizes for our information services might be identical” between the U.S. and China, Koerl said.
Transforming Sportradar Into a ‘Global Player’
Looking further into the future, Sportradar believes it will be able to use its data collection and technological capabilities to expand into entire new areas of business within the sports industry.
One idea now starting to bake is an over-the-top (OTT) streaming service, which is something most consumers are familiar with in a general sense through Netflix and Amazon Prime.
In June, Sportradar launched its Sportradar OTT platform to provide sports federations and rights holders with a customizable streaming service. Its launch partner was the European Handball Federation, one of Europe’s smaller professional sports organizations.
As part of this service, Sportradar would be responsible for the technical parts of running the platform, as well as general maintenance, while figuring out how to monetize the traffic, likely through either a subscription service or advertising model. The rights holder or federation would be responsible for managing the content, while all revenues generated would be shared.
The idea behind this is that Sportradar would be able to help smaller federations, those such as the International Tennis Federation, International Table Tennis Federation or universities, which tend to face more challenges growing their traffic or receiving air-time through traditional broadcast channels than can much more lucrative larger federations, make better use of the data they produce.
A customized media portal, enriched with professional-grade data visualizations developed by Sportradar, would help them to better attract and engage fans.
“Many people are saying it doesn’t have the scale and it doesn’t have the audience to monetize it,” said Koerl. “But if you create a complete media portal which you can scale over all those sports, that looks a little bit different. That concept is working pretty well. It’s small, but it’s beginning to gain traction.”
Koerl views much of these forward-thinking projects as fitting into a broader transformation of the Sportradar business that will take place over time. As it expands its geographic reach and breadth of products, it will be able to better compete with global technology players by offering an array of different types of products and services. He pointed to Microsoft as an example.
“What is Microsoft? Is it broadcasting, a technology company, mobile? It is at the end everything. These are the global players,” Koerl said. “The transformation is we’re going from one business segment, now into five or six.”
All of these new segments will, of course, be backed by Sportradar’s complex data services. It will become a function of figuring out new ways to use that data analysis to enhance various components of the global multibillion-dollar sports business.
“Nobody knows to what point that leads at the end, but everybody knows this is the future,” Koerl said. “The exciting thing is the market size is so big and the opportunities are so unlimited.”