Sportradar is divesting part of its sports technology business for $170 million while retaining the technology that underpins the collection and processing of sports data. In parallel, the company is deepening its ties with Kalshi and Polymarket, the two most prominent members of the new generation of prediction markets. On the surface, these read as a handful of discrete corporate moves. Taken together, however, they reveal how the economics of the betting industry are being redrawn, and why data providers may end up better placed than some of the operators they serve.
In October 2026, Sportradar announced a deal to sell Atrium Sports to the US-based Teamworks Innovations for $170 million in cash. The buyer will take over a sports analytics business geared toward coaches, scouts, and professional teams. Sportradar, meanwhile, will retain its computer vision solutions, automated cameras, graphics technology, and part of its competition management products. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026.
On its own, the sale of a division for $170 million would hardly have been an event capable of reshaping the sports data market. What makes this case interesting is not the price tag but the logic behind it. The company is shedding a business that directly serves sports teams, and concentrating its resources on betting, gaming, and media, where the same data can be monetized through several channels at once.
This move becomes especially intriguing against the backdrop of prediction markets' growth. While Kalshi, Polymarket, and traditional bookmakers compete for users, Sportradar is steadily strengthening its position as an infrastructure partner to several players in that market at once.
A question arises: might selling betting infrastructure turn out to be a more resilient business than betting itself?
Why is Sportradar selling its sports team analytics business while holding on to its data-collection technology and expanding its work with prediction markets? On 3S.INFO, we take a close look at how official statistics become infrastructure for bookmakers, exchanges, and market makers, and whether serving competing platforms might prove more resilient than fighting for the end user. A separate question is how much of its revenue a provider can actually keep after paying for sports rights, technology, and regulatory compliance.
Why Sportradar Is Selling Sports Analytics but Keeping the Technology
The story of Atrium Sports traces back to the 2021 acquisition of Synergy Sports. That company developed sports analytics solutions, primarily in basketball and baseball. Its technology let teams study game footage, analyze player actions, prepare for matches, and make decisions about player scouting.
For Sportradar, the acquisition was a logical way to expand its technological presence in professional sports. The company gained access not only to sports statistics but also to tools for automatically collecting and analyzing them.
Five years on, the priorities have shifted.
In its October statement, Sportradar made plain that selling Atrium Sports would let it focus on its key verticals: betting, gaming, and media. Notably, the company took care to specify that it would retain part of the technology and the related revenue already integrated into its core business.
That is a telling detail. Sportradar is not walking away from computer vision or automated sports video production. It is simply parting ways with a business that sells analytical tools directly to coaches, clubs, and scouts.
The difference lies in the commercial model.
A professional team buys an analytics platform to solve its own problems. The pool of potential buyers is capped by the number of clubs, sports organizations, and specialists that need such a tool. Even a successful platform has to build specialized functionality, support clients, and compete for sports teams' budgets.
In the betting industry, automated data-collection technology can serve bookmakers, prediction exchanges, media companies, and other consumers of sports content all at once. A single technological process becomes the foundation for several commercial products.
This doesn't imply all such verticals are automatically more profitable than team analytics. But they offer more room to scale existing technology without having to build a fundamentally new product every time.
There is also a financial motive. Sportradar said the valuation of the business being sold corresponds to a double-digit EBITDA multiple, attractive relative to its own market valuation. The specific multiple and Atrium's EBITDA have not been publicly disclosed, so the deal's appeal in absolute terms cannot yet be assessed.
But the logic is clear: sell a specialized division at an attractive valuation, keep the sought-after technology, and direct capital toward growing the core business.
How Sports Statistics Became Betting Infrastructure
Not so long ago, sports data was viewed mainly as an add-on service for bookmakers. A provider supplied match results, statistics, and event updates, and the bookmaker used them to set odds and manage bets.
Today the role of data is far broader.
A modern sportsbook depends on a continuous stream of information. For live betting, what matters is not just the final score but every event capable of shifting the probability of an outcome: a sending-off in a football match, an injury to a key player, a change in the lineup, the result of the next serve in tennis.
The more markets an operator offers, the more complex the infrastructure needed to service them. Bet Builder, micro-bets, personalized offers, and automated risk management demand more granular data, faster updates, and reliable probability models.
At the same time, a data provider isn't selling mere numbers. What carries commercial value is the rights to use them, the quality of collection, the speed of delivery, the breadth of coverage, and the ability to embed the information directly into a client's products.
That is why official partnerships with sports leagues become a major competitive advantage. An operator can build a sportsbook interface in-house, but securing comparable access to official data from top-tier competitions is far harder.
The acquisition of IMG ARENA, completed by Sportradar in November 2025, illustrates this strategy well. Along with the business, the company gained a portfolio of relationships with more than 70 rights holders, covering roughly 38,000 events with official data and 29,000 streaming events across 14 sports.
The deal's structure proved unusual: Sportradar did not pay the seller a standard purchase price. The agreement included financial payments from the seller totaling around $225 million, including funds to fulfill obligations to sports rights holders.
This shows how intricate the economics of sports content are becoming. Rights to data and broadcasts carry strategic value, yet at the same time demand serious financial commitments. Buying a large portfolio does not guarantee profitability: it has to be commercially loaded.
This is precisely where Sportradar's scale starts working in its favor. The company can distribute the same licensed content across different categories of clients, increasing the potential return on rights and technology investments.
Prediction Markets Open a Second Betting Market for Sportradar
A traditional sports bookmaker accepts bets and manages its own book of risk. A prediction exchange works differently: participants trade contracts on the outcome of events, and price is shaped by supply and demand.
The difference in how the product is built is substantial, but the infrastructure needs largely overlap.
To launch a market on the outcome of a football match, a platform needs reliable information about the competition, accurate rules for determining the result, timely data delivery, and safeguards against manipulation. For in-play trading, the requirements become even stricter.
Therefore, the growth of prediction markets creates additional opportunities for companies already serving traditional betting.
On June 8, 2026, Sportradar announced a multi-year global agreement with Kalshi. The company became a provider of official sports data, live odds, and technology solutions for a number of leading competitions, including MLB, NHL, MLS, and UFC.
Yet the most interesting part lies beyond the direct contract with the exchange.
The agreement allows Sportradar to work with participants in the Kalshi ecosystem, including brokers and market makers.
Market makers provide liquidity by continuously posting buy and sell orders on contracts. To do so, they need up-to-date data to assess event probabilities and adjust prices. The faster the situation on the field changes, the more a reliable information stream matters.
So Sportradar gains potential access not to a single client but to an entire group of companies that form the infrastructure of trading.
In August 2026, the company expanded its deal with Polymarket. The new partnership covered more than 20 sports leagues and competitions, corresponding to roughly 300,000 matches a year. Beyond official data and odds, the package includes streaming, marketing tools, and sports integrity monitoring services.
The result is an intriguing setup: Kalshi and Polymarket compete for market participants, liquidity, and commercial partners, but both rely on Sportradar's infrastructure.
For a data provider, this is potentially more profitable than an exclusive bet on a single future industry leader.
If one platform gains market share at the expense of another, demand for quality sports data doesn't necessarily disappear. It may simply be redistributed among clients. Of course, the actual payoff will depend on contract terms, consumption volumes, and servicing costs.
Who Stands to Earn More: Prediction Exchanges or Data Providers?
At first glance, the answer seems obvious: platforms handling billions of dollars in trades should have far greater commercial potential than the companies selling them statistics.
But trading volume is not revenue, and revenue is not profit.
If $1 billion in trades passes through a prediction market, that doesn't follow that the platform has earned $1 billion. Its income depends on fees, the fee structure, how operations are distributed, and other monetization terms.
In classic betting, it's also important to distinguish betting turnover from GGR, the operator's gross gaming revenue after payouts. A data provider's economics are different: revenue may come from licensing fees, technology subscriptions, service-usage charges, and commercial agreements with clients.
So comparing these models by a single turnover figure would be incorrect.
Platforms hold an enormous advantage: they own the user relationship, the interface, the brand, and the mechanisms for monetizing trading activity. If a company becomes a market leader and builds durable liquidity, the scale of its business can grow far faster than its costs.
But the price of such growth can be steep. Platforms have to invest in user acquisition, technology infrastructure, regulatory compliance, risk management, and fraud prevention. On top of that, they face competitive pressure on fees and on the cost of acquiring customers.
An infrastructure provider operates in a different part of the value chain.
It doesn't have to convince every user to open an account or execute a trade. It's enough that several large platforms need its data and technology. As the client base grows, part of the investment in collecting and processing information can be spread across a larger volume of commercial contracts.
Yet this model cannot be called guaranteed more profitable either. Sports rights are expensive, and renewing them may come with rising licensing fees. Large bookmakers and exchanges wield serious negotiating power and can push for lower prices, turn to alternative providers, or build some solutions in-house.
As a result, the most telling metric becomes not the size of the market a company serves but the share of the value created that it can retain after paying for rights, technology, and operating expenses.
Perhaps the key question for investors isn't how many billions of dollars will flow through prediction markets, but how much of those billions will turn into durable profit for each participant in the infrastructure chain.
Sports Leagues Are Becoming Another Center of Influence
There is another side to this story: the sports organizations themselves.
Rights to official statistics, video content, and the commercial use of sporting events belong to various rights holders and are governed by contracts. For data providers, this is at once a source of competitive advantage and a serious dependency.
As prediction markets grow, sports leagues are gaining new ways to control the use of their content.
Previously, their commercial relationships with the betting industry were built mainly around sponsorship, official data, broadcasts, and agreements with bookmakers. Now prediction exchanges and their technology partners are being added to the mix.
The NBA is a particularly telling example: in October 2026, it set out its own approach to working with prediction markets, including restrictions on certain types of contracts. This shows that sports organizations are looking to shape not only the commercial use of their brand but also the terms on which new platforms operate around their competitions.
For Sportradar, this trend cuts both ways.
On the one hand, a company with existing official agreements and a developed technology infrastructure may prove a convenient intermediary between rights holders and new market entrants. Getting data through a ready-made provider is often simpler than negotiating separately with dozens of leagues.
On the other hand, the growing commercial value of data can drive up the cost of the rights themselves. If sports organizations see an additional revenue stream in prediction markets, they may revisit licensing terms, impose restrictions on how the information is used, or demand new payments.
Regulation adds further uncertainty. In the US, the status of sports event contracts remains a subject of dispute between federal and regional authorities. Sportradar itself has flagged in its annual report the risks tied to how existing sports rights apply to prediction markets and to possible additional regulatory requirements.
So holding a portfolio of official agreements does not automatically confer the right to commercialize any sports data in any product and any jurisdiction.
Sportradar Is Building Its Business Around Several Revenue Streams at Once
Looking at Sportradar's recent corporate decisions as a whole, a consistent logic comes into view.
The 2024 acquisition of XLMedia's North American affiliate assets broadened the company's ability to acquire users for betting operators. The purchase of IMG ARENA expanded its portfolio of sports rights and content. Deals with Kalshi and Polymarket opened an additional distribution channel for products it already had. And the sale of Atrium Sports reduces its presence in specialized analytics for sports teams while retaining the technology that serves the core business.
In effect, Sportradar operates at several stages of the commercial chain at once: from sourcing sports data to building betting products, broadcasts, integrity monitoring for competitions, and user acquisition.
The first results of this model are visible in the financial statements, though separating out the contribution of each deal and segment isn't yet straightforward.
For the full year 2025, Sportradar's revenue reached €1.29 billion, up 17%. Adjusted EBITDA rose 33% to €297 million, and the corresponding margin came to 23%.
In the second quarter of 2026, the company's revenue grew 19% year over year to €378 million. Adjusted EBITDA came in at €76 million, also up 19%. At the same time, the company posted a net loss of €4 million, influenced in part by unrealized foreign-exchange losses.
These figures confirm the business is growing, but they don't yet show that prediction markets have already become a significant source of profit. The financial terms of the Kalshi and Polymarket deals haven't been disclosed, and no separate revenue from the new direction is broken out in the reported results.
The reporting for subsequent periods will be more telling. Investors should watch how quickly new contracts turn into revenue, whether margins can be expanded, and whether rising spending on sports rights is accompanied by costs growing faster than revenue.
Can a Data Provider Become the Main Winner of the Betting Industry?
Sportradar's story is a reminder of a characteristic feature of fast-growing markets. The most attention usually goes to the companies that work directly with end users. Their brands become recognizable, they attract investment, and they compete for leadership.
But as a market matures, some economic power may shift to infrastructure providers.
In traditional betting, this process is already visible. Large operators need official sports data, risk-management systems, odds-formation tools, payment solutions, and marketing technology. Providing these services has become a major B2B business in its own right.
Prediction markets can extend this model, since they add to existing bookmakers new trading venues, brokers, market makers, and other participants who also need quality information.
But further development will hinge on several conditions. Exchanges need to retain user interest and sufficient liquidity. Data providers need to hold on to rights and keep licensing economics acceptable. Regulators and sports organizations need to set the rules for how sports content is used in new financial products.
If all these pieces fall into place, companies like Sportradar will be able to profit from the growth of an entire category without shouldering the full commercial risk of any single trading platform.
That is precisely why the sale of Atrium Sports deserves more attention than an ordinary move to shed a non-core asset.
Sportradar isn't simply downsizing. It is reallocating capital toward areas where it already has the technological capabilities, licenses, client base, and room to scale.
Perhaps the future winner in the sports prediction market won't just be the company that attracts the most users, but the one without whose data those users couldn't trade effectively at all.
While prediction exchanges compete for leadership, Sportradar is betting on profiting from their rivalry.
