COVER STORY: SPORTRADAR
Another key point with this new type of content is that, because it is rooted in actual sports and their outcomes, it builds trust with players as nothing could ever be a fi x. For example, we plan to develop a golf game where players anticipate where the ball will land, choosing from a series of grid squares. It’s fully randomised and features historical data and video cut into 20-30 second clips. This will clearly be based on actual sports mechanics but will also be built on proven gaming mechanics.
The golf game is basically a roulette, just being delivered to players in a different way and it provides seamless interaction between the sport and gaming itself. Players can still watch some content and talk about that content by creating online communities around a certain sport.
It’s also about introducing unifi ed global betting in a very short time window. While we’re already delivering assets of those sports in the sportsbook sections, the likelihood is that these new games will probably do very well for the cross-sell of these properties on other parts of the websites.
The social aspect, a sense of community that we plan to offer is a real game-changer too. Playing slots at home on your own is not necessarily achieving the best experience for many players – even though we also offer these games - but we understand that sports viewing is about community; it’s about being part of something bigger and interacting with others as part of the enjoyment. We’re building a live 24/7 experience centre where
iGaming represents a natural and scalable extension of our business, and a
strategic acceleration of our long-term growth roadmap
players select a game and a live stream to watch and engage with simultaneously on the same screen, blending sports viewing and gaming into a new experience. In this environment, players will be able to interact with each other in real time, sharing tips, game preferences and reactions. We’re able to bring many sports such as darts, cricket, golf and so on to a wider audience who would never bet on those sports or watch the action on TV. The iGaming is
about cross-pollination back to the sports, creating greater engagement and bringing in new fans.
PREMIUM IGAMING CONTENT Ad fi nally, Playradar will also offer premium iGaming content to operators. Using our existing expertise and resources, we’ll develop our virtual sports portfolio even further and build a full suite of casino games, from slots and table games to arcade and crash, developed to the highest standards to give players their best iGaming experience. I am very humbly and respectfully excited about what happened when we announced the new brand. The response from the industry, from partners, was very, very positive - our ideas, intentions, our innovation and what we want to bring resonated well with the audience. I think the need is there. Operators know that players are interested in sport casino games, in sport themes within casino games. And until today, it was very hard to produce that because you needed a whole array of data, of streams, of casino abilities and integrations and so on. Now Sportradar has seen that we can bring all this together under the Playradar brand, it will be fun for the players and an exciting proposition for the operators.
A lot of hard work lies ahead in creating an entirely new vertical but I’m looking forward to the challenge of leading a new business operation. 2026 will be busy year featuring lots of developer time, that’s for sure but it will result in a portfolio of exciting new experiences to offer to operators and their players.
GIO APRIL 2026 7
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