James Glanz, Agustin Armendariz, and Jacqueline Williams, New York Times
Last winter, the National Football League began lining up suitors to distribute what has become one of the hottest commodities in sports: live data from games.
Once limited to basic statistics, that data now includes everything from the bend in a soccer ball’s flight to a running back’s acceleration, measured by computer chips in his shoulder pads. Streaming from fields, courts and rinks, it drives not only game apps on fans’ mobile phones and computers, but also fantasy sites and professional scouting reports.
The N.F.L.’s courtship ended in April when the league dumped its longtime partner and signed a lucrative new deal with a company called Sportradar, which is based in Switzerland and little known in the United States. The N.F.L. deal was only the start for Sportradar: In August, the company began providing N.F.L. data to FanDuel, one of the two largest daily fantasy sports sites, and a month later struck a deal to distribute data for the National Hockey League. Then it signed up a roster of high-profile investors, including Michael Jordan, the basketball great.
What went unsaid in the whirlwind, though, was that the upstart is well known in another industry with an insatiable need for live statistics: online sports betting, which is almost entirely illegal in the United States. And that line of business offers a contrast as obvious as a referee’s fluttering flag to the policies of the N.F.L., whose public opposition to all sports gambling is among the strongest of any major American professional league.
The N.F.L. deal, sweetened with an equity stake in Sportradar, underscores the league’s ambiguous position on the shifting ground of gambling in the Internet age, in which betting is increasingly woven into the culture of American sports but the nation’s legal structure lags behind. Indeed, Sportradar’s rise in the United States raises a question: whether the company and its investors, along with the leagues, are positioning themselves for a loosening of restrictions on sports gambling.
For all its opposition to gambling, the N.F.L. is already deeply enmeshed in the daily fantasy sports games now facing rising legal scrutiny over whether they constitute gambling by another name. Almost every N.F.L. team has a partnership deal with the fantasy sites, and two of the league’s most powerful owners have stakes in DraftKings, the other top site. The league also has a partnership in Britain with DraftKings, which has a gaming license there.
On its website, Sportradar’s gambling arm, called Betradar, reports that it services “more than 450 bookmaker clients,” but it is the troubled legal status of some of those clients that has drawn attention in the industry.
A technique that exposes a website’s underlying coding indicates, for example, that one of Betradar’s clients is BetCRIS, which has perhaps the most extensive history of prosecution in the United States of any online gambling site; it has been named in at least five major indictments, and many of its agents in the United States have been convicted.
Sportradar’s business model has received a harsh public airing in Britain, where courts decided, in what is regarded as a landmark case, that the company was improperly copying sports data from a competitor and selling that data to betting websites. The N.F.L. was aware of Sportradar’s focus and legal record, according to the former chief executive of Stats, the Illinois-based company that had held the data contract with the N.F.L. and was negotiating to retain it.
Rest is here…
