Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl fired a warning shot to the sports betting industry during the SBC Barcelona Summit. He spoke of the recent IPO by his company that raised $8 billion in its listing on NASDAQ.
“For me the important thing of the IPO process was understanding how the digital industry sees our marketplace and its opportunities,” Koerl said.
After 25 years in the business, Koerl said for the first-time sports betting is an integral part of business from Europe to North America, Africa to Asia, according to SBC News.
“We are seeing new marketplaces open-up. Take America, a billion-dollar market in 2019 that is expected to grow to a market size addressing $20-30 billion that will outmatch Europe,” he said.
Asia is the sleeping giant, Koerl said, and India and China also will come into play. “This really is sports betting’s global moment to transform and innovate.”
On the flip side, he feels operators are held back by conservative platforms that “remain 10 years behind the financial industry. I’ve have had a lot of controversial debates with bookmakers, and for me the breakthrough will be offering players individual prices and individual risk management.”
He went on, “The companies that are witnessing stagnation in a time of exponential growth will simply fall behind.”
In other conference news, experts said match fixing worsened during the pandemic.
Sportradar Director of Global Operations Tom Mace, speaking at the “Integrity in Sports Betting” panel, said the number of suspicious matches continues to climb, according to CDC Gaming Reports.
“Quite simply, the predictions are coming true,” he said, referring to an SBC panel last year, which discussed the likelihood of increased suspicious activity in the context of the pandemic. “This is not just my opinion. The data and evidence are actually coming back now that match fixing in the last 18 months has continued to worsen.”
Over 18 months, match fixing affected countries, regions, sports.
Since April 2020, Sportradar catalogued more than 1,000 “highly suspicious matches,” in 12 different sports and more than 70 different countries.
Moderator Matt Fowler from the International Betting Integrity Foundation said the increase in match fixing during 2020, was not that far ahead of 2017 or 2018.
As a result of pandemic lockdowns, betting firms diversified their offers to include lower-profile sports that were still operating, esports, and the online casinos.
Panelist Ludovico Calvi, president of the Global Lottery Alliance against Sport Competition Manipulation, said, “The phenomenon we’ve seen so far has come up in the last few days with the Evergrande case, where a large corporation, which owns a lot of the Chinese clubs, is on the verge of financial collapse. This will obviously create a domino effect on other sports organizations.”
When a new club owner comes to the horizon and tries to buy a sports organization, he or she needs to go through a very detailed due-diligence protocol, the so called Know Your Owner, KUO, so that all your expertise, your financial backgrounds, are all checked.
