Rights and Data Layer

Rights and Data Layer

Sportradar Group AG occupies one narrow link in the sports betting chain. It buys the exclusive right to collect and distribute official data and video from sports leagues, and it sells that feed — together with the odds, the screens and the trading services built on top of it — to the bookmakers who take the bets. Revenue in the year to December 2025 was €1,290.0 million [1], earned in over 120 countries [2]. Two features of the link it occupies shape everything that follows: the price of its main input is set by monopoly rightsholders on multi-year cycles, and the customers it sells to are, across most of Europe, not certified as lawful by any regulator that also looks at Sportradar.

Sources: revenue and growth from reported financials, FY2025 Form 20-F revenue by product group [3]; sport rights share derived from €404.3 million of sport rights expense against reported revenue [4]; client concentration from Our Clients [5].

Between the league and the bookmaker

A sports bet moves money along a short chain, and every participant in it earns from a different point. At the top sits the rightsholder — a league, a federation, a tournament organiser — which owns the event and can therefore sell the exclusive right to distribute what happens inside it, ball by ball, in real time. At the bottom sits the bettor. In between sit two commercial layers: the betting operator that takes the wager and carries the risk, and the supplier layer that gives the operator the data, the prices and the software to run the book at all.

Sportradar is in the supplier layer, and it has bought its way to the top of the chain. Its exclusive partnerships include the NBA, MLB, the NHL, the PGA Tour, MLS, the ATP, FIFA, CONMEBOL, UEFA, the AFC and the DFL, with tennis rights running through the USTA, the French Tennis Federation and the All England Club as well [6]. Downstream it sells to Bet365, Caesars, DraftKings, Entain, FanDuel, Flutter and William Hill, to broadcasters including CBS Sports, ESPN, Fox Sports and Rogers Media, and to Apple, OpenAI, Meta, Google and Amazon; it holds relationships with over 400 leagues and federations. Its top ten clients were 27% of FY2025 revenue and its top 200 about 79% [7].

Three terms recur throughout this report and are worth fixing here. Gross gaming revenue, or GGR, is what bettors lose — stakes placed less winnings paid out — before any tax or promotional cost. Net gaming revenue, or NGR, is GGR after gaming duties and certain player incentives such as free bets have been deducted; it is the smaller number, and the gap between the two is set by governments. In-play betting is wagering on events inside a live match rather than on the final result; it already accounts for the majority of gross gaming revenue in the more developed European markets, and it is the form of betting that cannot exist without a low-latency official data feed [8]. That last point is the commercial reason this layer exists at all: a bookmaker cannot price the next corner kick from a television picture.

Source: FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F), revenue split by product groups [9].

Four fifths of the business is betting. Betting and Gaming Content — the data feeds, pre-match and live odds, streaming and engagement tools — was €817.3 million in FY2025; Managed Betting Services, where Sportradar runs the trading desk on the operator's behalf, was €229.8 million. The remaining €242.9 million sits in Sports Content, Technology and Services: affiliate and advertising work, performance analytics sold back to teams, and integrity monitoring sold to federations [10].

Contracts in the betting half take one of two forms. Either a fixed-fee recurring arrangement — a guaranteed minimum for a set number of events, with per-event fees above it — or a variable revenue share struck as a percentage of the client's gross gaming revenue, typically also with a minimum guarantee underneath [11]. The FY2025 Form 20-F quantifies the split: 67% of total revenue was generated from fixed-fee recurring arrangements and the remaining 33% from revenue sharing arrangements, against 68% and 32% in FY2024 [12]. So roughly a third of the revenue base moves with how much bettors lose to Sportradar's customers.

The largest cost is the mirror image of the largest asset. Sport rights expense, including amortization of the capitalized licences, was €404.3 million in FY2025, up 15% on the prior year [13]. That is 31% of revenue paid to a set of counterparties each of which is, for its own competition, the only possible seller. What that bill does to the shape of the business is the subject of the next act; what matters here is that the input price in this layer is not set by a market.

The pool everyone in the layer draws from

Sportradar sizes its own demand pool using H2 Gambling Capital's global summary of January 2026: a global sports betting market of $127.1 billion in 2025 growing to $192.7 billion in 2030, a compound rate of 9%. Inside that, the mature markets — the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, much of Europe and Asia Pacific — are forecast to add about 5% a year, while the United States runs from $19.7 billion to $35.7 billion at 13% and Africa grows fastest of any continent at 14%. Europe and Asia together are still expected to be about 61% of the 2030 revenue pool. Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting and thirty-two plus DC have legalized it online, per Vixio's January 2026 outlook [14].

Source: H2 Gambling Capital Global Gaming Data Summary dated January 15, 2026, as cited in the FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F) [15].

Two qualifications belong with those numbers. The first is that the growth is not in the markets where most of the money currently is: the developed markets that dominate today's pool are the 5% line, and the double-digit rates attach to territories being legalized. The second is provenance. Neither the H2 report nor the Vixio outlook is in the public record here; both are known only as quoted by the companies that bought them. That said, they are quoted by more than one company. Kambi, a rival supplier one layer down the chain, independently cites Vixio for European regulated online sports betting gross gaming revenue rising from roughly €15.2 billion in 2024 to about €20.2 billion by 2028, and points to Finland's multi-licence regime from July 2027 as the next opening [16]. The suppliers in this industry are working from the same two forecasters.

Where the money pooled in 2025

An industry compounding at 9% does not lift every layer of it. FY2025 separated the value chain sharply, and the separation is visible in the four suppliers whose own filings and calls are on the record.

Sources: Sportradar revenue and growth from reported financials and the FY2025 Form 20-F [17]; Genius Sports group revenue [18] and growth [19]; Kambi revenue [20] and decline [21]; Better Collective revenue, growth derived from reported figures [22].

The two companies that own official rights grew; the two that sell services around them did not — a comparison The Barrier and the Bill takes up at full strength, where the deceleration diagnosis needs it.

Two cautions belong with that table. The four companies do not all report in the same currency, and Genius Sports reports in dollars while the other three report in euros, so a weak dollar year flatters the comparison in one direction and penalizes it in the other. And the run's normalized peer scoreboard did not load, so every peer figure above was read off that company's own filing or transcript rather than a common series. The direction of the divergence is well supported; its precise magnitude is not.

The deduction that happens before the invoice

The clearest teaching of how government tax policy reaches a supplier in this industry comes not from Sportradar but from Kambi, because Kambi's contract is written on the far side of the deduction. Kambi charges commission on its operators' net gaming revenue — GGR less deductible costs, principally capped player incentives and tax. In 2025, 98% of its operators' GGR was subject to betting duties in locally regulated markets, up from 94% in 2024, and the year's gaming-related taxes plus additional player-incentive deductions cut those operators' NGR by 13% [23]. A tax rise in that structure is not a demand event. It is an arithmetic one: the base the commission is calculated on shrinks the moment the duty changes, before any bettor changes behaviour.

The named causes are specific and dated. Kambi points to Dutch deposit limits and higher Dutch gaming taxes, and to planned rises in UK remote gaming duty and general betting duty as further pressure on partners in a key market [24]. Better Collective, from a different layer entirely, attributes its own rebasing to Brazil's regulatory transition, which cost approximately €22 million of 2025 bottom line against a previously communicated €35–55 million, and notes that 100% of group revenue is now generated in regulated markets [25]. Two independent suppliers, two layers apart, describe the same force.

Sportradar's exposure to that force runs through a different door, and the distinction is worth holding precisely. Its variable contracts are struck as a share of the client's gross gaming revenue, not net [26], so a duty increase does not shrink Sportradar's base by definition the way it shrinks Kambi's. It reaches Sportradar one step later, through what the operator does next: cutting promotional spend, pulling out of a market, or losing volume to whoever is not paying the duty. The 20-F states the transmission mechanism in its own words — if the regulatory environment becomes unfavourable or unfeasible for clients to keep offering sports betting in a jurisdiction, the result is market closure and lost revenue "due to a decreased demand for our products and services" [27]. Roughly a third of the revenue base sits on client gaming revenue [28]. The compression is real and it is second-order; it is behavioural rather than definitional, and it arrives with a lag.

The licence Europe does not require

European gambling law was written to protect the person placing the bet. Because its overriding purpose is consumer protection, it addresses the supply of betting products to end consumers — and Sportradar has no end consumers. Its business is conducted solely business-to-business, and so, in the company's own description, "most European betting laws do not cover the provision of such supply services to the betting industry on a B2B-basis and thus, in most European jurisdictions, our business is not subject to holding a license." Only a few European jurisdictions license B2B suppliers at all. Where none is required, Sportradar operates on approvals or certifications from the relevant authority, on agreements in which the client warrants that its own consumer-facing offer complies with local law, and on due diligence checks Sportradar performs on its clients' licensing status [29].

The United States is the opposite arrangement. There, Sportradar is directly and extensively regulated under federal, state, local and tribal regimes, must maintain its licences to keep operating, and is subject to review of the character and financial stability of its owners, managers and directors — with the further feature that a violation in one jurisdiction can trigger disciplinary action in others [30].

Source: FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Regulation and Licensing — European laws and regulations [31] and U.S. laws and regulations [32].

The practical difference is a difference in what an outsider can check. In an American state there is a licence, a register and a regulator with the power to act on what it finds. In most of Europe the record that a given customer was lawful consists of a representation inside a commercial contract and a diligence file inside the supplier — both private documents, neither of which anyone outside the company has ever seen.

That the industry's gray and black markets are large enough to matter is not only Sportradar's characterization of its own risk. Kambi's chief executive, discussing a business he distinguishes explicitly from a data supplier's, describes Kambi as "one of very, very few B2B sports betting operators, while still many are only focused on black/gray markets," says its regulated-only footprint is what made wins with PMU, Ontario Lottery and Gaming, British Columbia and Atlantic Lottery possible — "we would have no chance to win one of these deals having still a big gray market footprint" — and notes that as a turnkey platform "we can't hide anything," specifically because of the transparency Nevada licensing demands [33]. A gray market here means a jurisdiction where online betting is neither expressly licensed nor clearly prohibited; a black market means supply in defiance of a prohibition or without a licence the jurisdiction requires. The distinction matters later, because the parties arguing about Sportradar do not all draw the line in the same place.

November 2025: the layer narrows

On November 1, 2025, Sportradar acquired 100% of IMG ARENA, the sports betting rights business of Endeavor, and its global rights portfolio. It paid nothing at closing. Instead the transaction carried total financial consideration of $225 million running toward Sportradar: $100 million payable to Sportradar in equal instalments on the first and second anniversaries of closing, plus up to $125 million of cash prepayments made by the seller to certain sport rightsholders — settled before the acquisition, and therefore recorded as a reduction in the liabilities Sportradar assumed rather than as purchase consideration [34].

Source: FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Note 3 preliminary purchase price allocation for IMG ARENA [35].

The purchase price allocation says what the seller was escaping. Sportradar took on €370.0 million of assets — €305.2 million of it intangible, which is to say the rights themselves — against €516.4 million of liabilities, of which €472.5 million was trade payables, current and non-current. Net liabilities assumed were €146.4 million, goodwill €74.0 million, and consideration transferred was negative €72.4 million [36]. In this industry, "trade payables" of that size are the unpaid licence bill owed to rightsholders. So the transaction is a clean read on one thing: a portfolio of exclusive league rights, held by a well-capitalized owner, was worth less than nothing once the obligations attached to it travelled with it. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority cleared the deal unconditionally, accepting the rarely-granted counterfactual that IMG ARENA would otherwise have exited the market [37].

The company's own list of named competitors registers the change. It did not shorten — one name was replaced.

Sources: FY2021 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Our Competition [38]; FY2024 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Our Competition [39]; FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Our Competition [40].

IMG Arena was named as one of four primary competitors in every annual report from the IPO year through FY2024 [41] [42]. In FY2025 it is gone, and Infront Sports and Media stands in its place [43]. The evidence supports a narrower claim than "a duopoly": Sportradar and Genius Sports are the two suppliers on this record with disclosed revenue at scale and rights portfolios that span the stack. No market-share figure for anyone in this layer exists in the record, and Stats Perform, Infront and BetConstruct file nothing here, so the census is a list of names rather than a measured structure. What is measured is the transaction price, and it says that running a sub-scale rights book against these obligations was not viable for the party that tried.

The number that cannot be computed from outside

Which leaves the question of how much of the demand in this layer nobody regulates — and the honest answer is that the public record cannot settle it.

Sportradar's figure is bottom-up. Asked directly on the Q1 2026 call to quantify revenue from operators in illegal markets, the chief executive gave a range: "it's a low to mid-single-digit number, so 5% to 12%, 13%. That's the range which we have, and we are drilling this down from our operational business" [44]. The chief financial officer then walked the arithmetic an outsider could reconstruct: Sports Content, Technology and Services is a little over 20% of revenue and is not betting-related; within the other 78%, the primary exposure sits in the data and odds business rather than in the fan-engagement and audiovisual streaming products; strip those out, apply published gray-market estimates to what remains, "and you can see that the math takes you back down to that low to mid-single-digit exposure" [45] [46].

Set against that, on April 22, 2026, Muddy Waters and Callisto Research published reports estimating that 20–40% of Sportradar's revenue came from illegal operators; the shares fell 22.6% in the following session [47]. And set against both, a rival supplier says without being asked about Sportradar at all that many B2B suppliers in this industry focus only on black and gray markets [48].

Four features of this record make the gap between 5% and 40% unresolvable from outside it, and they are structural rather than evidentiary.

The first is the perimeter. Across most of Europe no regulator licenses Sportradar's B2B activity [49], so there is no supervisory file, no public register and no examination report against which an outsider could test a client list. The second is the client list itself: Sportradar names its marquee accounts and discloses concentration percentages, but not the tail — and on any version of this story the disputed revenue sits in the tail rather than among Bet365 and FanDuel [50]. The third is method: the company's own estimate is explicitly built client by client from operational data that is commercially confidential [51], so it cannot be reproduced from a filing. The fourth is definitional. The three parties are not counting the same thing: the chief executive's answer folds gray and black together, Kambi's chief executive separates them, and the short sellers' term is "illegal operators". Neither short report is in this record — the 20–40% estimate is known here only through news coverage of it.

That is the shape of the disagreement. It is not a case where one side has published a number the other has failed to rebut; it is a case where the measurement surface an outsider would use does not exist, by construction, in the part of the world where most of the disputed revenue would sit.

What the rest of this report examines

Sportradar is a rights-and-data supplier that has bought exclusivity from monopoly sports leagues on €1,529.2 million of licence fee payables carried inside trade payables rather than borrowings [52], and that now owns a layer which narrowed to two after a rival's rights book changed hands at negative consideration [53]. It trades 25% off its three-year high and 46% below its 2021 IPO price of $27.00 [54] on 2.3 times the revenue it earned that year, because two short sellers put a number on the share of its customers that no regulator licenses — while growth has stepped down to 16.6%, the retention metric sits at its lowest disclosed reading of 109% against 127% a year earlier [55], and the founder's Class B voting control converts automatically on September 30, 2028 [56].

Each of those clauses is a chapter. The first of them is the bill: what it costs to keep the exclusivity that made this layer narrow, how it is paid for, and where on the balance sheet it is recorded.