Your match data has buyers. Are you giving it away?

Who's already paying for this?

Start with the two companies that dominate official sports data. Sportradar reported record revenue of €1,290m in 2025, with €1,047m from its betting technology and solutions products. Its total sport rights expenses rose to €404m, up from €352m the year before. The rights figure is the one that matters to you, because it's money paid out for the right to collect and distribute sports data and streams. Genius Sports, the official data and technology partner to the NFL and the Premier League, grew group revenue by 31% to $669.5m.

The demand behind those numbers isn't slowing either. In the US alone, commercial sports betting revenue rose 22.8% to $16.96bn in 2025 on a total handle of $166.94bn. The odds on every one of those bets were set using fast, reliable data. Media demand is growing too, with Genius Sports' media technology revenue up 37% to $144.5m in 2025. Betting, broadcast, fantasy and performance buyers all want the same raw material, and your matches produce it every week.

If someone else is selling data from your matches, you should at least be the one who agreed the fee.

What about integrity?

Selling data to betting companies raises a fair concern. In 2025 Sportradar monitored more than 1,000,000 events across 70 sports and identified 1,116 suspicious matches. The big data companies also run integrity services for federations and leagues, and for a smaller competition that protection can be worth as much as the licence fee. It's far harder to protect a competition whose data is scraped and sold by people you've never met, so ask any prospective data partner exactly what integrity support comes with the licence.

This market isn't reserved for the elite, either. Sportradar now covers more than one million matches a year. Its acquisition of IMG ARENA alone added relationships with over 70 rights holders and around 38,000 official data events. That reach extends into second divisions, women's leagues, youth tournaments and niche sports. The question I'd ask is whether those rights holders negotiated their deal or simply accepted one.

Turning a feed into a product

A product has an owner, a specification, a customer and a clear idea of what it's worth, and most match data has none of those. It's collected by whoever turns up and licensed on whatever terms they offer. The fix starts with deciding what you collect, who owns it, who may resell it and where, and writing that down as a simple data rights policy.

Then treat each type of buyer as a customer segment with its own needs, fee and contract length. Event data for betting is one product and performance data for clubs is another. Tracking data takes this further: our team's work on the FIFA Football Data Ecosystem generated more than 9 million spatial data points per game. Few rights holders need that kind of depth, but every rights holder needs to own what it does collect. Match data describes the game and fan intelligence describes the audience, and together they let you value and package what you sell far more precisely.