Endeavor has agreed to pay a total of $225 million to give its IMG Arena data platform and the accompanying portfolio of rights to Sportradar, the latest asset to be sold as the company prepares to be taken private.
The $225 million is comprised of a $125 million payment to Sportradar and up to $100 million in “cash prepayments” to some of its various partners, according to a Sportradar filing on Wednesday morning. Sportradar will assume IMG Arena and its business, which includes over 70 rightsholders across 14 sports and 30,000 streaming events. The partners include Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, MLS and the PGA Tour.
The news comes a few months after Endeavor announced that it had reached an agreement to sell its sports betting division—which included IMG Arena—for $450 million to an outside group led by Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel. This Sportradar deal does not include OpenBet, the betting tech platform that Endeavor bought in 2022 for $800 million ($750 million in cash and $50 million in stock). That price was 33% less than the original $1.2 billion purchase agreement.
Endeavor said at the time of that announcement that it would “continue to market IMG Arena for sale to a third-party purchase” prior to closing. Emanuel’s group is still on track to buy OpenBet for that $450 million price, according to someone familiar with the details, but IMG Arena is no longer a part of it. Given the fact that IMG Arena’s market value appears to be negative—and Endeavor itself is paying the $225 million to separate it—that may result in a notable financial benefit to Emanuel’s group.
A representative for Endeavor declined to comment on the financial specifics, or why the company paid to unload IMG Arena. It may be paying to unload IMG Arena just to get it off the books, or because the rights deals are hard to monetize. A rep for Sportradar also declined to comment.
Endeavor has been steadily unloading assets in the wake of an April 2024 announcement that private equity giant Silver Lake—already a sizable Endeavor investor—would be taking the company private at $27.5 per share. The plan was for Silver Lake to buy a more streamlined version of Endeavor, and that take-private is set to happen next week.
Sportradar shares closed Wednesday at $22.80. The stock is up 31.49% so far this year, and up 125.97% in the past 12 months. The stock rose 13.55% on Wednesday alone following this announcement and the release of Sportradar’s fourth quarter earnings in which revenue beat analyst estimates.
In a blog post Wednesday morning, Sportradar founder and CEO Carsten Koerl said “the unique structure of this deal accelerates our revenue and cash flow profile and will be accretive to our margins.”
On a call with analysts Wednesday, Sportradar CFO Craig Felenstein offered some context about what the IMG Arena rights might mean for Sportradar’s future. The company’s 2025 revenue guidance—without factoring in the IMG rights—was for growth of about 15%. In a world where Sportradar had the new assets on Jan. 1 of this year, that guidance would be “in the high 20% range,” Felenstein said.
Both he and Koerl said they believed that Sportradar would be able to better monetize the rights when combined with its tech and existing portfolio. Koerl referenced Sportradar’s ATP rights, which it took over from IMG Arena last year.
“We managed this property significantly better,” he said. “And that is given the scale, which we have. We have 800 bookmakers. We have 900 media companies connected to this machine. And this is a well-oiled machine; we are global … and we simply have the leverage on this.”
Koerl also said the $100 million in payments from Endeavor to the rights holders, which will reduce Sportradar’s future obligations, was to “get those deals more in line with market conditions that we can monetize on them.”
The IMG Arena deal come one month after the company announced a new extension of its rights deal with MLB through 2032, a move that Jefferies analysts said “removes a key headwind from [Sportradar’s] story.”
Under the deal, Sportradar will pay MLB an undisclosed annual licensing fee, and the league will be issued up to 1.86 million ordinary SRAD shares, worth about $37.3 million as of Tuesday’s close. That total is about 1.3% of the company’s current share count, per Jefferies.
The company has exclusive agreements with MLB, the NBA, NHL, ATP, Bundesliga and UEFA, all of which are secure through at least 2027.
(This article has been updated with comments from the company’s call with analysts and with the stock price at Wednesday close.)
