Sportradar has reached an agreement to buy data and video analytics provider Synergy Sports from a firm backed by Los Angeles Dodgers co-owner Todd Boehly.
The deal, which still needs regulatory approval and is expected to close next quarter, comes just a few weeks after Sportradar agreed to be taken public by a Boehly-led SPAC. Terms of the Synergy purchase weren’t made public, nor was the relationship, if any, between the Synergy deal and the SPAC transaction.
Boehly, whose Eldridge Industries owns a majority of Synergy, isn’t on the company’s board and was not directly involved in the negotiations, according to someone familiar with the talks.
Synergy Sports is the combination of three companies—Atrium Sports, Synergy Sports Technology and Keemotion. The latter two were acquired by Atrium in 2019, and the three were combined last September. Outside of Eldridge, Synergy backers include Elysian Park Ventures, a private investment firm created by Dodgers owners, including Boehly, Mark Walter, Magic Johnson and Peter Guber.
The combined company offers a range of tech solutions, from video capture and data feeds, through platforms to produce, distribute and monetize content. Synergy has league-wide deals with the NBA, MLB and all of the NCAA’s Division I men’s and women’s basketball, in addition to a presence in dozens of countries around the world.
Those capabilities have obvious synergies with Sportradar, which takes data and packages it into products for media companies and sportsbooks globally. The acquisition might be especially important on the NCAA side, where data is typically much more fragmented.
“Adding Synergy Sports to the Sportradar family will expand our product offering into U.S. college sports data and video analytics, and further cements our relationships with the major sports organizations in the U.S. and around the world,” Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl said in a statement.
Sportradar has spent the past year simultaneously exploring a traditional IPO and an acquisition via SPAC, and it appears to be going the second route. Earlier this month it signed a letter of intent to go public through Boehly’s Horizon Acquisition Corp. II, according to sources, a deal that values the data firm at $10 billion. Should the transaction close, it would be one of the largest SPAC acquisitions for a sports-related company.
Sportradar’s investors include the NFL and a trio of NBA owners—Ted Leonsis, Michael Jordan and Mark Cuban. Cuban was the largest investor in Synergy Sports Technology before it sold to Atrium.
