Priced for an Allegation

Priced for an Allegation

The full-year guide was reaffirmed on April 28, 2026 [1]. Six days before that, the shares closed at $13.04 against $16.84 the session before — a fall of 22.6% that followed no reported result, no withdrawn guide and no company disclosure of any kind [2]. Everything the market has done to this company since is dated from that session, and the arithmetic in the current price has to be read against it.

What follows is that arithmetic: what $14.68 pays for on the company's own presentation and on a stricter one, where consensus sits relative to a guide management has not moved, and which parts of the forward number the published record supports. It closes on the three things the record does not settle.

Sources: closing price and the drawdown from the highest close in the available record, from the daily price series [3]; the enterprise-value multiple and free-cash-flow yield are derived below from that price, the FY2025 share and treasury counts [4] [5] and consensus estimates.

One session, and the path since

On the morning of April 22, 2026 two short sellers published on Sportradar. Muddy Waters titled its report "Putting the BET into Aiding and Abetting" and estimated that 20% to 40% of revenue came from illegal operators, on the basis of a six-month investigation, a sting at the ICE 2026 trade show, source-code analysis of more than 40 betting platforms and fifteen employee interviews; Callisto Research published alongside it [6]. The shares fell 22.6% that day on 27,482,052 shares against a 90-session median of 2,431,523 — 11.3 times normal — and the tape has not returned to the pre-report level since [7].

The company puts the same exposure at "a low to mid-single-digit number of our total revenues," with a simulation on public data reaching "a maximum of 12%" [8]. Which figure is closer is a question about the size of the unregulated customer base, and the reasons it cannot be settled from outside the company are set out in Rights and Data Layer. What matters here is narrower and fully observable: the whole of the visible de-rating attaches to that publication rather than to any number the company has reported.

Source: daily closing prices as recorded in the run's price series, cross-checked row-for-row against an independent exchange history endpoint [9] [10].

Source: daily share volume from the same price series [11].

The path since separates into pieces worth naming.

The quarter did not stop the fall. Q1 results were pulled forward a week to April 28; on the day they were published the shares fell a further 11.3% to $12.35, the lowest close in the record [12]. From that low the price is up 18.9% to $14.68. Measured from the highest close available — $19.69 on March 19, 2026 — the peak-to-trough decline inside the window was 37.3%, and the drawdown at July 27 is 25.4%.

The largest upward move since has a name and a date. The shares closed at $13.90 on June 5 and $16.96 on June 11, a gain of 22.0%, across the June 4 announcement of a renewed Wimbledon data and audiovisual betting deal — a right inherited in the IMG ARENA acquisition — and the June 8 Kalshi prediction-markets partnership [13] [14]. By July 27 the price had given back 13.4% of that, to $14.68. Roughly two-thirds of the move those two announcements produced is no longer in the price.

Three checks a reader would expect at this point cannot be run on this record, and each absence is worth naming. There is no base rate for earnings-day reactions: one earnings date sits inside the 90-session price history, April 28, so no distribution of surprise against realised move can be built, and the single observation available is an 11.3% decline on a quarter that missed. Positioning cannot be sized: the run's short-interest file reports no official position rows, no short-sale volume, no borrow-pressure indicators and no days-to-cover, so how crowded the short side became after April 22 is unknown. And every derived technical series in the run — volatility, relative performance, moving averages, unusual-volume detection — returns unavailable on a 90-session history. Two of the largest single sessions in the window, minus 8.4% on April 9 and plus 7.4% on July 6, have no dated cause anywhere in the corpus [15].

Sources: moves and volumes computed from the daily price series [16]; attributions from the dated news record [17] and the Q1 2026 results release [18].

What $14.68 buys

The share count has to be built before any multiple can be quoted, because two classes of share carry different economics. At December 31, 2025 there were 221,390,294 Class A shares issued and 903,670,701 Class B, of which 120,000,000 Class B — converted by the founder into 12,000,000 Class A in April 2025 — sit in treasury pending cancellation [19]. Class B carries one tenth of the nominal value and therefore one tenth of the dividend entitlement of a Class A share [20], so the 783,670,701 Class B shares outstanding are 78.4 million Class A-equivalents. Treasury holdings of 3,939,842 Class A come out [21]. That gives about 295.8 million Class A-equivalent shares at year-end. A further 6.6 million Class A were repurchased between January 1 and April 24, 2026 — the difference between 12.5 million shares for $228 million since the plan began and 5.9 million for $111.2 million through December 31 [22] [23] — leaving roughly 289.2 million.

At $14.68 that is a market capitalization of about $4.25 billion. Converting is the one place this arithmetic rests on an assumption rather than a document: no exchange rate is staged anywhere in this run, and the rate used here — 1.1375 dollars per euro — is implied by the run's estimates record, which carries the same 22-target analyst panel in both currencies — $14.91, $19.61 and $34.91 against €13.11, €17.24 and €30.69 [24]. On that rate the share price is €12.91 and market capitalization about €3.73 billion. Net cash at the FY2025 balance sheet date was €313.5 million, so enterprise value is roughly €3.42 billion.

Sources: derived from the July 27, 2026 close [25], the FY2025 share and treasury counts [26] [27], 2026 repurchases [28], reported FY2025 revenue and Adjusted EBITDA [29], the licence fee payable balance [30], and consensus Adjusted EBITDA from the run's broker estimate feed, for which no filing page exists.

On earnings the same price is 41.6 times FY2025 diluted Class A earnings of €0.31 [31], 29.8 times the FY2026 consensus of €0.43 and 18.7 times the FY2027 consensus of €0.69 [32]. On cash it is a 4.7% free-cash-flow yield on FY2025 free cash flow of €174.7 million, about 6.1% on the FY2026 consensus of €227 million and 8.0% on the FY2027 consensus of €297 million.

The same company, two enterprise values

The right-hand column of that table is not a stress test. It is the same multiple computed on the assumption that an interest-bearing obligation is debt.

Sportradar's quarterly releases state that it has no debt outstanding, and on the balance-sheet definition of borrowings that is accurate [33]. Sitting inside trade and other payables, however, are licence fee payables for capitalized sport rights of €319.4 million current and €1,209.9 million non-current — €1,529.2 million in total [34]. Rights Bought on Credit establishes what that balance is: interest-bearing, dollar-denominated vendor credit accruing roughly €80 million a year. Adding it to enterprise value moves the FY2026 consensus multiple from 8.8 times to 12.7 times, and the FY2027 multiple from 7.1 to 10.3.

Two facts bound the question from the other side. The obligation is contractual rather than callable — it is the payment schedule on rights already licensed, disclosed with its maturity profile. And Adjusted EBITDA as the company defines it already carries the full cost of those rights, including amortization of the capitalized licences [35], so the earnings denominator is not flattered by the capitalization in the way it would be if that amortization were added back. The multiple is genuinely two-sided; what decides it is whether a fixed multi-year cash claim reads as financing or as working capital.

Two arm's-length marks

The company has been priced twice in transactions rather than on screens, and both marks sit above the current price.

The September 2021 initial public offering sold 19,000,000 Class A shares at $27.00 [36]. On April 24, 2025 a secondary offering of 23 million Class A shares was priced at $22.50, with a CPP Investments affiliate, TCV and the founder among the sellers while the company concurrently bought 3 million shares [37]. At $14.68 the shares sit 45.6% below the listing price and 34.8% below the secondary print.

Over the same span revenue went from €561.2 million in FY2021 to €1,290.0 million in FY2025 — 2.3 times — and free cash flow margin from 0.3% to 13.5%. The shareholder outcome since listing has been set by the multiple, not by the operating record.

One limit on that comparison belongs in plain sight. No price history before March 18, 2026 exists anywhere in this run, so the company's own historical multiple range cannot be computed and the two transaction prints are the only dated valuation anchors available. The drawdown figure of 25.4% is labelled in the run's fact table as a three-year drawdown but is computed over a 90-session history whose highest close is $19.69 on March 19, 2026; against the secondary print the trailing decline is at least 34.8%, and against the IPO price 45.6% [38].

Consensus has settled on the floor

Guidance for FY2026 was issued on March 3, 2026 and reaffirmed on April 28: revenue growth of 23% to 25% in constant currency, equal to €1,557 to €1,582 million as reported; Adjusted EBITDA growth of 34% to 37% in constant currency, equal to €390 to €400 million; margin of 25.0% to 25.3%, an expansion of 200 to 225 basis points; and free cash flow conversion above 56% [39] [40].

Consensus FY2026 revenue is €1,556.2 million [41] — €0.8 million below the floor of that range. The 21-analyst distribution runs from €1.52 billion to €1.56 billion, so the most optimistic published estimate also sits at the floor rather than inside the range. Consensus Adjusted EBITDA of €390.7 million is likewise the bottom of the guided band, though that panel is less uniform: its low of €362.6 million is €27 million below the guided floor and its high of €400.2 million matches the top. The reported-currency growth this implies is 20.6%, against the 23% to 25% constant-currency guide; the three-to-four point gap is dollar translation rather than demand.

What consensus embeds beyond FY2026 is a margin bend rather than sustained growth.

Sources: FY2025 actuals from the FY2025 Form 20-F [42]; FY2026 and FY2027 consensus revenue from the estimates record [43]; FY2028 and FY2029 revenue and all consensus Adjusted EBITDA from the run's broker estimate feed, for which no filing page exists.

Revenue growth steps down from 20.6% to about 10% by FY2029 while Adjusted EBITDA margin rises from 23.0% to roughly 31%, and Adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow grow faster than revenue in every visible year. Broker disagreement sits entirely below the revenue line. FY2028 revenue spans 7.5% of the mean across 13 analysts, while FY2027 statutory earnings per share span €0.45 to €0.93 — 73% of the mean — across 18, and FY2027 net income €141 million to €271 million across 15. Coverage also thins as the years extend: 21 analysts on FY2027 revenue, 13 on FY2028, two on FY2029, and three on the normalized earnings line in every annual period.

The drop-through the year requires

Because the argument is about what falls through to profit, the incremental margin — the share of each additional euro of revenue that reaches Adjusted EBITDA — is the number worth building from the primary record.

FY2025 delivered a good one. Revenue rose €183.4 million and Adjusted EBITDA €74.4 million [44], a drop-through of 40.5%. Against that, the FY2026 guide is not demanding in aggregate: €267 to €292 million of additional revenue producing €93 to €103 million of additional Adjusted EBITDA is 34.9% to 35.3% [45]. Consensus implies the same 35.3%.

The demanding part is that none of it has arrived. In the first quarter revenue rose €35.3 million to €346.5 million, up 11.3% as reported and 16% in constant currency [46] [47], while Adjusted EBITDA rose €7.1 million to €66.0 million — a drop-through of 20.0% [48]. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 19.0% against 18.9% a year earlier: ten basis points of expansion against 200 to 225 guided for the year [49] [50].

Subtracting the quarter from the year gives what the remaining nine months must do. Revenue must rise 23.7% to 26.2% as reported against 11.3% delivered; Adjusted EBITDA must rise 36.2% to 40.4%; the drop-through across those nine months must be 37.2% to 37.5% against 20.0% delivered; and margin over the balance of the year must run at 26.8% to 27.0% against 24.3% in the comparable period.

Source: derived from reported revenue and Adjusted EBITDA for FY2024 and FY2025 [51], Q1 2025 and Q1 2026 [52], and the reaffirmed FY2026 guidance range [53] [54]; the consensus figure is derived from the run's broker estimate feed.

Management's own framing is that the year is back-half weighted: the chief financial officer said on April 28 that the strongest revenue growth was expected in the second and third quarters given the timing of sporting events [55], and broker models carry the same profile, with a third-quarter Adjusted EBITDA margin near 31% against 19.6% in the first. That seasonality is real and disclosed. The observation that survives it is narrower: the aggregate FY2026 drop-through the guide asks for is lower than FY2025 delivered, and the one reported quarter of the guided year delivered half of it.

The revision tape

The estimate record has been turning down for four quarters, and the turn predates the short reports.

Source: consensus against reported revenue by quarter from the run's estimate feed, captured before each actual became effective; no filing page carries the consensus side. The Q1 2026 actual of €346.5 million is from the results release [56].

Revenue surprise decayed from plus 7.2% in the third quarter of 2024 to minus 4.2% in the first quarter of 2026 — €346.5 million against €361.7 million expected, the largest miss in the visible record and the third consecutive one. Normalized earnings per share for that quarter came in at minus €0.01 against €0.05 expected. The forward earnings line has been cut recently rather than gradually: FY2027 normalized earnings per share stood at €0.74 six months ago, €0.72 three months ago and €0.75 one month ago before dropping to €0.69, a 4.8% reduction over 90 days, while FY2027 revenue moved 1.3% over the same period. The line being cut carries three estimates; the revenue line it is derived from carries 21.

Twenty-two targets

The published sell-side distribution has not been rebuilt for a smaller revenue base.

Source: target-price distribution and recommendation mix as of July 23, 2026, from the analyst estimates record [57]; spot from the daily price series [58].

On the larger of the two panels in the record — 22 targets, updated July 23, 2026 — the mean is $21.15, the median $19.61, the high $34.91 and the low $14.91, which is 1.6% above the market price. The recommendation mix is 16 buy, two outperform, four hold, and no sell or underperform [59]. A second, partly overlapping panel of 19 analysts, last updated July 27, reads a mean of $22.47 with a high of $40.00 and a low of $14.00 — 4.6% below spot — and does carry two sell ratings [60].

Exactly one published target across the two panels sits below the market price, and no consensus or broker-model line anywhere in this run is built on a revenue base reduced for the April allegation. The gap between spot and the lowest target is the part of that allegation the published sell-side has not written down.

The bid inside the price

A mechanical buyer of size is operating in the tape being measured, and its scale relative to the market is unusual.

The authorization-versus-execution record is set out in Guidance and Control; what matters here is its size relative to the market. Authorization stands at $1.0 billion [61], which against a market capitalization of about $4.25 billion is 23.6%. Cumulative execution through April 24, 2026 was 12.5 million shares for $228 million [62], an average of about $18.24 a share and 24% above the July 27 close.

The pace then changed. On April 28 the board approved a $250 million enhanced open-market programme to be completed "within approximately 3 months, subject to trading volumes" [63]. At $14.68 that is about 17 million shares, or 5.9% of the Class A-equivalent base, inside one quarter. Against a median daily traded value of roughly $36 million, $250 million spread over about 63 sessions is on the order of 11% of the value changing hands. A programme of that relative size is part of the price being measured, and its completion window closes around late July 2026 — so the observed price includes it and the period immediately after does not.

On the same call the founder and chief executive announced an intended personal purchase of $10 million of shares [64]. Whether that purchase happened cannot be determined from this corpus; the reporting obligation that would make it visible took effect on March 18, 2026 [65], and the ownership record behind the pledge is set out in Guidance and Control.

Management's reaction to the drawdown was, in short, an unchanged guide plus buying. The chief executive opened the April 28 call by rejecting the reports directly — "Sportradar and I reject the unfounded and misinformed allegations contained in the reports" — and referred investors to a compliance filing made the same morning [66].

The back-half driver, read three ways

Asked on April 28 what supported an unchanged guide after a quarter that grew 11%, the chief financial officer named three things — marketing services normalising, further IMG synergies, and one more: "the third and probably the biggest is we have really good sight lines right now, we think, with regards to some prediction market revenue opportunity that's going to happen in the predominant in the back half of the year" [67].

Prediction markets are regulated in the United States as derivatives venues, where participants trade event contracts on outcomes rather than placing wagers with a bookmaker. The interest for a data supplier is that those venues need the same official feeds, prices and integrity monitoring an online sportsbook needs.

Eight weeks earlier the same executive had sized that line differently. On March 3, asked directly whether prediction-market revenue was in the 2026 guide, he answered: "We do have some minor contributions from prediction markets in our 2026 guidance, predominantly from things like customer acquisition, fan engagement tools, and a little bit of data that we would be providing. For the most part, any significant deal associated with prediction markets is not included in that guidance" [68]. On the same call the chief executive put a magnitude on the whole opportunity: an uplift "in the tens of millions, not in the hundreds of millions, from prediction markets" [69].

So the same line moved from a minor contribution with significant deals excluded, to probably the biggest reason the year holds, in eight weeks — with nothing signed in between. On April 28 the stated position was that the company was "in an active commercial discussion with a number of prediction market players for the use of official data and products related to MLB, NHL, MLS and UFC amongst other global leagues and competitions" [70]. The signature came six weeks later, on June 8, when the Kalshi partnership was announced [71].

Whether that signature is upside to the guide or already inside it is unclear from the record, and the ambiguity is management's own. On the April call the chief financial officer said that "if anything that happens in, what I would say, short term gets announced, you can pretty much assume that, that was included in our estimates for the year. Anything that gets done a little bit later, you can assume is additive on top of that" [72]. Six weeks is not obviously either.

The magnitude the company itself has offered is the useful check. Tens of millions of euros against a guide of €1,557 to €1,582 million is one to three points of revenue, and the nine-month revenue increment the guide requires is €232 to €257 million. On the company's own sizing, prediction markets cover a meaningful minority of that gap rather than most of it — which puts the weight of the reaffirmation back on marketing services recovering and IMG content continuing to sell.

The company's own risk disclosure runs the other way from its guidance commentary, and both statements are the company's. The FY2025 annual report lists competitive, regulatory and contractual risks from prediction markets, including whether they "may reduce the size, scale, or growth of traditional sports betting markets, which could diminish the value of our existing data licensing arrangements and other commercial relationships in that space," and notes that disputes between state regulators, the venues and market participants have already produced litigation, state regulatory actions, proposed federal rulemaking and legislative action [73] [74].

Three other suppliers to the same industry have described the same development in their own filings and calls, and they do not agree.

Sources: Sportradar's Q1 2026 earnings call [75] and Q4 2025 earnings call [76]; Genius Sports' Q3 2025 earnings call [77]; Kambi's Q1 2026 earnings call [78]; Better Collective's 2025 annual report [79].

The disagreement is not cosmetic. Kambi, whose platform business sits one layer downstream, reports zero measurable effect on its own revenue and says several of the 60-plus regulators it deals with have told it that engaging with these venues is not an option [80]. Genius Sports, the closest comparable in the rights-and-data layer, describes the same development as a possible expansion of its addressable market but has set explicit regulatory and commercial thresholds before it will participate [81]. Sportradar has signed. That is a real difference in posture between two companies competing for the same rights and the same customers, and it is the kind of divergence that resolves into numbers within a few reporting periods rather than years.

Dated ahead

Four things in front of this price are dated and checkable, and each names a line a reader can test.

Sources: the August 3, 2026 results date and quarterly consensus from the estimates record [82]; the repurchase programme from the Q1 2026 results release [83]; the class-action filings and lead-plaintiff deadline from the dated news record [84]; the personal-purchase statement from the Q1 2026 earnings call [85]; FY2025 non-routine litigation costs from the FY2025 Form 20-F reconciliation [86].

Three questions the record does not answer close the account.

The first is the size of the contested revenue base. No document in this corpus quantifies revenue attributable to operators alleged to be unlicensed, and no estimate line in either the consensus or the broker-model feed is built on a reduced base. The price implies some probability that the base shrinks; the record holds no number against which to test that probability, from either direction.

The second is the composition of the back half. The largest named driver of the reaffirmed guide is a revenue line the company sized at tens of millions in March, called probably the biggest support for the year in April, and contracted with one venue in June — while its own annual report lists the same development as a competitive, regulatory and contractual risk, and two peer suppliers read it in opposite directions.

The third is what the price contained. Roughly $250 million of company buying was scheduled into about 63 sessions ending in late July 2026, in a stock whose median daily traded value is near $36 million. The August 3 print is the first observation of both the business and the tape without that programme running.

At $14.68 the shares carry a market capitalization of about $4.25 billion, an enterprise value of roughly €3.42 billion on the company's presentation or €4.95 billion counting the licence fee payable, 8.8 or 12.7 times FY2026 consensus Adjusted EBITDA, a 6.1% forward free-cash-flow yield, and a 45.6% discount to a listing price set on 43% of the current revenue. The de-rating is dated to one April session, and the guide it fell through has not moved since.