Carsten Koerl, chief executive at sports technology and betting services company Sportradar, has said that the increasing number of datapoints being made available, throughout all elements of sport, to companies such as his, provide the opportunity for “exponential growth.”
Koerl, speaking to selected media (including GlobalData Sport) while at the ICE conference in Barcelona, responded to a question from GDS on how Sportradar could continue to provide value for industry partners while taking on such a wide range of partners across different sectors of the sports industry.
For example, the firm, headquartered in Switzerland, has tie-ups with heavyweight sports properties based on services stretching from betting data provision, through igaming, to integrity services.
Koerl, who founded Sportradar in 1997, responded that he does not “consider these things to be challenges, I’m more about the word opportunities.”
Explaining this stance, he said “bringing together the data, the visualizations, the simulations, the understanding of the fans,” is the opportunity Sportradar is now attempting to seize.
He added: “Assimilating the vast amounts of new data gives enormous opportunities for developing new things, creating new stories about every sport, and putting those stories into products for our clients.”
He also commented that the entire industry is operating at a time when the market is booming.
Koerl suggested that over the next decade, he expects - based on analysis - the sports betting sector to swell between 10% and 12%, representing “very strong underlying market growth.”
For example, early December saw Sportradar open a new office in Brazil, where sports betting as an industry was legalized in 2018 and has since proved extremely popular (and profitable).
The Sportradar CEO added that there is also exponential growth “from a data and technology perspective …
“We get more and more datapoints because of the technology … Not only from the sport itself, but also from the data generated by sports’ interactions with their fans, and from the liquidity data.
“Connecting all these complex pieces of data provides enormous opportunities. There is the potential for exponential growth here.”
In terms of Sportradar’s own place within the industry, the CEO said he felt that the combination of all its service areas is what it “can do significantly better than any single operator on their own … It is a very exciting 2025 ahead.”
Overall, including the new Sao Paulo premises, Sportradar now has 28 offices across 22 countries on five continents.
Koerl also discussed the addition of iGaming services, as a new arrow in Sportradar’s bow.
He said, on that front, “it’s a natural extension for us. More than 80% of our clients offer both sports betting and igaming through their licenses.
“Building intelligence by using all our tools and moving into the igaming space is a natural progression for us.
“We’re patterning with a lot of big companies to do this, and we are [also] developing some of those solutions by ourselves.”
Koerl added that, in this space, the Sportradar ad:s programmatic advertising service is assisting clients across igaming, and that through ad:s “we are delivering a higher acquisition rate, in a highly competitive market.”
He explained that in his own opinion, Sportradar is “the best in the world,” at helping clients with “the loop from [customer] acquisition to retention."
