Sportradar has expanded its commercial agreement with Polymarket to cover more than 20 sports leagues and competitions, taking in around 300,000 matches a year across soccer, basketball and tennis. Shares in the St. Gallen-based data supplier (NASDAQ: SRAD) rose 6% on 27 August, the day the two companies announced the deal.
The expansion is structured under a U.S. agreement. New properties include the Bundesliga, Euroleague Basketball, the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA), the National Basketball League (NBL), Tennis Grand Slams and UTR Pro events. It builds on an earlier arrangement between the two companies covering the ATP Tour, Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Hockey League (NHL), Major League Soccer (MLS) and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
What Polymarket is buying
The agreement is not a data feed alone. Sportradar is supplying five product lines to the prediction market platform:
- Sports data and live odds to price pre-game and in-play markets and to settle them
- Live streaming across the covered competitions, including exclusive rights for the ATP Tour, the Bundesliga and Euroleague Basketball
- Fan engagement content: scores, schedules and data visualisations
- Marketing and customer acquisition services
- Integrity services, including the Sportradar UFDS AI detection system and the Sportradar Integrity Exchange (SIE), a network for sharing integrity threats between participants
The streaming component is the part that separates this from a standard supply contract. Exclusive audiovisual rights mean Polymarket users watch the Bundesliga or Euroleague inside the same interface where they trade the market, a product configuration that mirrors what regulated sportsbooks have offered for a decade. The marketing line is equally telling: Sportradar is selling a prediction market operator the same customer acquisition services it sells to licensed betting operators.
What the companies said
Carsten Koerl, chief executive of Sportradar, framed the category as an adjacent growth market rather than a competitor to the sportsbook business that generates most of the company’s revenue.
“Prediction markets represent a compelling adjacent growth opportunity and Sportradar is cementing its role as the foundational infrastructure powering this ecosystem. Accurate real-time data, premium live content and a robust integrity framework are what allow these markets to price efficiently, settle reliably, and retain the confidence of participants.”
Ari Borod, president of sports business development at Polymarket, pointed to the scale of the coverage.
“Expanding our relationship with Sportradar across more than 20 leagues and competitions gives Polymarket access to premium sports data, live content and integrity services at an unprecedented scale. We’re excited to continue building on this partnership as we expand our sports offering.”
Sportradar is supplying both sides of the category
Polymarket is not the company’s only prediction market client. Sportradar signed a multi-year data deal with Kalshi in June, giving it commercial relationships with the two largest event contract platforms in the United States at the same time as it supplies the sportsbooks competing with them for the same customers.
That position drew scrutiny earlier this year, when a short seller questioned the company’s exposure to markets operating outside conventional gambling licensing. Koerl rejected the claims at the time. The financial case for the strategy has held up so far: Q2 revenue rose 19% to €378m, though the quarter still ended in a €4m net loss.
Polymarket’s own trajectory explains why suppliers are willing to build for it. The platform is raising about $1bn at a valuation above $20bn, and sport has become the volume engine behind that number, with prediction markets taking a measurable share of US betting handle on major events.
The European position is different
The agreement covers the United States, and the distinction matters. In Europe, Polymarket is being pushed out of market after market rather than expanding into them. Denmark’s regulator added Polymarket to a block list of 98 sites in August. Spain blocked both Polymarket and Kalshi in May. In Italy, the ADM ban ended Polymarket’s €22m sponsorship of Lazio. National regulators across the bloc have taken the position that event contracts on sporting outcomes are betting products requiring a local licence, whatever their status under US commodities law.
Sportradar therefore sits on both sides of a legal argument that European regulators consider settled and US courts do not. Its integrity products are the part of the package that reads as a response to that: UFDS AI and the SIE are the same tools it sells to leagues and licensed operators, and offering them to a prediction market is an argument that the category can be policed on the same terms as regulated betting.
Both companies say they expect to add further products, properties and markets under the framework. The open questions are whether US state regulators and courts accept sports event contracts as federally regulated derivatives rather than unlicensed betting, and whether any European jurisdiction opens a licensing route before the blocks harden further. Sportradar has already committed its data, its rights and its integrity systems to the answer.
Source: Sportradar
