13. August 2024
Carsten Koerl first gained a foothold in the sports data industry with Bwin. But the German then made his big breakthrough with Sportradar. The St. Gallen-based company has been listed on the Nasdaq since September 2021 – and Koerl has also been on the Forbes Billionaires List since 2022 with a fortune of one billion US dollars. But what exactly makes Sportradar so valuable?
The meeting rooms in the newly opened Sportradar location on the Austria Campus in Vienna are each named after a sports legend. When asked whether the interview should take place in Roger Federer’s or Hermann Maier’s room, the choice ultimately falls on the Austrian skier – which turns out to be quite appropriate. Koerl is talking about the Austrian’s famous comeback at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, when he returned just a few days later after a serious fall in the downhill and won two gold medals. This irrepressible will to win is a source of inspiration for the Sportradar founder. “I am very competitive. I enjoy competition, especially winning. Doing sport just for the sake of sport is tiring,” he says with a smile. This statement is certainly reflected in his professional career. Carsten Koerl founded two companies, Bwin and Sportradar, in which everything revolves around sporting competition.
With Sportradar – his second major start-up – Koerl has one of the world’s leading sports data providers. The company, which has its headquarters in St. Gallen but is represented at 35 locations in 19 countries, collects data and transforms it into digital content. Customers include bookmakers and media companies, but above all sports clubs and associations, including the European football association UEFA, the basketball league NBA, the NHL (ice hockey), NASCAR (car racing) and the ATP (tennis).
Sportradar has been listed on the US tech exchange Nasdaq since 2021. But the share price has not developed at all according to Koerl’s expectations. The issue price was US$27, which meant a market capitalization of around US$8 billion. Since then, however, the share price has gone downhill; Sportradar is currently at US$10.9 and has a market capitalization of US$3.24 billion. Koerl says: “It would be a lie if I said it wasn’t disappointing.” That is of course also the case, since Koerl’s net worth, with his 51% stake, depends largely on the share price. In 2022, the German made it onto the Forbes Billionaires List for the first time; his current fortune is around US$1 billion.
But for Koerl, this is just the beginning. He wants to convince investors to invest and use data to transform the sports experience.
The history of Sportradar started on a trip to Australia by Koerl after he had withdrawn from the operational business of his first company, the sports betting provider Bwin. Koerl had started the company together with the former skier and current sports marketer Harti Weirather and Varta majority owner Michael Tojner. Koerl had set up a service provider and moved his residence to Austria because there were more advantageous licensing options for betting providers. The site went online in 1998. One of the most significant developments in the company’s history was the introduction of its own live betting product, which allows players to place bets during an ongoing event. This feature, which has also been repeatedly sharply criticized with regard to gambling addiction, was extremely lucrative for the young company.
In 2000, Bwin (then Betandwin) went public on the Vienna Stock Exchange, and in 2001 Koerl withdrew from the operational business. The now large structures did not suit the entrepreneur, as he stresses: “If you’ve been used to making quick business decisions for five or six years, then it becomes difficult when there’s a supervisory board in between that may have other interests. It was an important lesson for me. I function better when I can be an entrepreneur and make decisions.”
He took a break and traveled to Australia with his wife. There he met Petter Fornass and Tore Steinkjer. The two developers from Norway had recently founded the start-up Market Monitor. Koerl saw a lot of potential in their technology for extracting and comparing bookmakers’ odds, but also weaknesses. He gave them tips and recommended offering bookmakers systems to identify inconsistencies instead of exploiting them. But Koerl didn’t just want to advise – he became the main investor.
«Am Times Square zu
sit where the pictures of
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg hang,
who also had their IPO there,
is a cool feeling.»
Carsten Koerl
«That was around 145,000 CHF. It certainly wasn’t a lot of money, but I never invested any more after that because it was clear from the start that we had created something that the market needed. Of course, I knew some customers in the sports sector, and that’s how the company developed,” he says. In the same year, the Market Monitor owners founded Sportradar AG, which from then on acted as the parent company. Market Monitor was renamed Sportradar AS and continued as a subsidiary. Koerl was a member of the founding team and was appointed CEO of Sportradar AG. A decision that proved to be spot on, as the expansions and extensions of the business areas in the years to come would show.
Sportradar subsequently grew rapidly – primarily through acquisitions. In 2012, the company bought the Slovenian company Klika and received an investment of CHF 43 million from EQT. In 2013, the company secured a majority stake in Sportstat, the data partner of Rugby World Cups and World Snooker. In 2014, Sportdata (now Sportradar US) was acquired, followed by the securing of exclusive distribution rights for NASCAR, NFL and NHL and investments from Michael Jordan and Mark Cuban in 2015. In April 2016, Sportradar took over the core business of Sportsman Media Holding GmbH, including Laola1.at.
The extensive growth leads to a broad range of activities. Sportradar also offers services to combat betting manipulation, but its core is sports content products and comprehensive services for betting providers via the Betradar sub-brand. Today, the company employs almost 4,000 people and is active in 120 countries.
Although Koerl is Even if the company is not satisfied with the share price development, the IPO in 2021 was still the most significant milestone for Sportradar. “Sitting there in Times Square, where the pictures of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others who had their IPO (initial public offering) there hang, is a cool feeling. The only thing that tops it is sitting there with Michael Jordan – a really great experience. It was important to me that as many people as possible were there,” says Koerl.
At the big event at Nasdaq, where a buzzer is pressed to start trading, Koerl made a remarkable observation about Sportradar investor Michael Jordan. The basketball legend was determined to be the first to press the buzzer, but Koerl was faster (he hit the buzzer at one on the countdown). “I’ve never seen anyone more ambitious than Jordan. It shows in everything, even the coin toss. He wanted to get better at golf – and built his own golf course,” says Koerl. In a direct comparison of wealth, Jordan has the edge. According to Forbes, Jordan’s fortune is $3.2 billion, while Koerl is listed at $1 billion.
The entrepreneur does not hide the fact that the development of the share price does not correspond at all to what Koerl sees in his own company. “It annoys me enormously. In my private opinion we deserve a better price, but I can do somersaults now,” says Koerl. “The price on the stock exchange is fixed and I have to constantly learn new things in order to inspire shareholders and motivate them to invest.” Koerl does not necessarily see the management of a listed company with quarterly reporting in the USA as conducive to long-term company development. He prefers a sustainable path “that shows consistent growth over the years instead of focusing on short-term quarterly fluctuations.”
Since the IPO, however, there is also something he is happy about. “I hold around 30% of the commercial share packages and also classic shares in a ratio of one to ten. This combination gives me control over more than 80% of the voting rights,” he says. “That is what I learned from Betandwin (now Bwin, ed.), where I realized that it was not right for me if I could not have a decisive influence on the company’s fortunes.”
Because Koerl knows exactly how he wants to shape the future of Sportradar – with a clear vision based on openness, data aggregation and strategic partnership. As the company’s founder and CEO, he has set a clear course for Sportradar based on the belief that data is the key to transforming the sports experience. Central to his strategy is the development of an open platform that enables sports and fan data to be collected, aggregated and made available globally in a usable format. “For us, it’s about understanding that we are not the only players in this global arena,” emphasizes Koerl. “It’s about setting standards and facilitating the exchange of data between all parties. Our platform should be agnostic so that partners can easily integrate their own applications.”
Koerl sees this positioning as a huge opportunity as the company transforms itself from a linear data source to an integral part of a broader data ecosystem. “Through strategic partnerships and B2B models, we have already shown how successful this strategy can be,” explains Koerl. “Our goal is to continue to grow by improving our services while integrating new data sources to strengthen our position as a leading company in sports data.”
