Munich For many football fans, the Champions League final this Saturday is the highlight of the season. The game is also special for Carsten Koerl, who with his company collects game data from hundreds of thousands of sporting events: his income depends on the sales of the betting providers – and these are likely to be exceptionally high in a final.
Koerl is not there in person when Real Madrid and Liverpool face each other at the Stade de France in Paris. But he is an important partner for the European football association Uefa. Since the end of last year, Sportradar has been the exclusive collector and distributor of data for betting purposes, authorized by Uefa, and supplies 900 betting companies worldwide.
Sportradar analyzes sporting events almost in real time and delivers the information to media houses, bookmakers and leagues. “For us, it’s about super-fast and ever more precise data,” explains Koerl. In addition, the company broadcasts sports competitions and analyzes them to avoid betting fraud – actually a growing market.
But the 57-year-old currently spends significantly more time in the meeting rooms of wealth managers in New York than in football stadiums. Born in the Allgäu, he has a lot to explain to bankers and analysts. Because his growth story doesn’t catch on with investors: Despite good results, the share price of his Switzerland-based company has fallen by almost two-thirds since it went public on the Nasdaq in September.
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On the first day, the paper slipped from $ 27 to $ 25 – and since then it has been downhill. The shares were last listed at around nine dollars, the lowest level since the issue. Instead of eight billion dollars, investors now only value the company at around 2.7 billion dollars.
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The price slide rankles Koerl – not just because he is a shareholder himself. “When I compete, I want to win,” he says. However, the head of the group does not have to worry about his job – thanks to a trick: Koerl holds 100 percent of the so-called Class B shares and 1.7 percent of the Class A shares in Sportradar – a construction that, according to American law, is seven years is limited.
As long as the company boss has 81.7 percent of the voting rights and thus secures power at Sportradar, even if its largest investor – the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board – currently holds 47 percent of Class A shares.
This power was important to him, because Koerl is an entrepreneur through and through and doesn’t like being talked into it. In 1997 he founded the internet betting provider Betandwin in Vorarlberg, Austria. Three years later he took the company public in Vienna. It now belongs to the Entain gaming group under the brand name Bwin.
With the issue, however, the company slipped away from him. The entrepreneur recalls that he quickly lost control. On his second attempt with Sportradar, he absolutely wanted to avoid that.
Sportradar delivers the data from several hundred thousand sporting events every year – like here from the game between HSV and Hertha BSC.
(Photo: IMAGO/Hübner)
Sportradar is largely unknown to the general public. In the sports industry, on the other hand, the company is one of the big ones. Koerl’s company employs around 3,000 people and is represented in 20 countries. According to its own information, its customers include prominent sports organizers: the American basketball league NBA as well as the American ice hockey league NHL, the world football association Fifa – and of course Uefa as the organizer of the Champions League. According to the company, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter also buy data from Sportradar.
The entrepreneur studied electrical and processor technology at the University of Applied Sciences in Konstanz and dedicated himself early on to sports, technology and programming. After graduating, Koerl programmed software for sports betting in the early days of the Internet, but nobody was interested in it. For this reason he set up his own company, Betandwin. In 2002 Koerl sold his shares for an estimated 150 to 180 million euros.
Sportradar is growing dynamically
After a six-month break in Australia, he decided to get back into business and took a 51 percent stake in the start-up Market Monitor, which was founded by Norwegian students as part of their doctoral thesis and processed data for online bookmakers. The company was renamed Sportradar in 2007. In 2012 he then bought the Swedish private equity firm EQT. The head office is now in Switzerland.
The company is growing dynamically: Last year Sportradar achieved sales of 561 million euros, an increase of 39 percent compared to 2020. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Adjusted Ebitda) climbed by 33 percent to 102 million. In the first quarter, revenues rose by 31 percent to EUR 167.9 million, while adjusted Ebitda fell by five percent to EUR 26.7 million.
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The biggest competitor Genius Sports fared no better on the stock exchange. The British company’s shares have been listed for over a year and have since lost more than 80 percent in value. Initially, the market cap was $3.8 billion, now it’s around $700 million. The business of the significantly smaller competitor grew by leaps and bounds in the first three months of the year. However, Genius Sports slipped deep into the red.
The USA is the largest growth market for sports radar. There the company relies on the liberalization of the betting business in more and more states. So far, this bet has worked: In America, sales more than doubled to 26 million euros in the first three months of the year. However, Sportradar is still in the red in the United States.
Koerl is poised for growth
But that doesn’t bother him, on the contrary. Koerl is poised for growth. “Reducing costs and optimizing, that’s not my thing,” is his credo. For the year as a whole, Sportradar expects sales to increase by at least 18 percent and profits to increase by up to 30 percent.
Perhaps the head of Sportradar would have jetted across the Atlantic to the final of the Champions League from his New York office if his club had been there: FC Bayern. Sportradar’s headquarters are in St. Gallen and Koerl now calls Switzerland his home. In terms of sport, on the other hand, his heart has been attached to the people of Munich for years. Of course, they fared like Koerl on the floor in the Champions League this year: there is only hope for better times.
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