At the Leaders Conference Sports Business Summit in London this week, it was announced that leading e-sports company ESL had entered into a partnership with sports data giant Sportradar.
The deal sees Sportradar developing a full range of products and services for ESL, including the processing and distribution of real-time match data.
Sportradar will also deliver live scoring to customers around the world and deploy its proprietary Fraud Detection System, monitoring 450 global betting operators to ensure ESL has a comprehensive insight into any suspicious betting patterns and behaviours related to its competitions.
Speaking at the event, ESL CEO Ralf Reichert said: “The rapid growth and expansion of the e-sports industry presents us with an ever-increasing myriad of not only opportunities but also challenges, the most important of which is arguably the preservation of the integrity of the competitions.
“ESL has led the charge on integrity in e-sports for many years with proprietary anti-cheating software and the recent introduction of anti-doping policies in its tournaments.
“With an ever-increasing volume of betting on e-sports competitions, expanding our anti-fraud initiative to also include match fixing, collusion and other activities related to illegal, underage and irresponsible betting, was the next logical step.”
Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl added that e-sports was the world’s fastest growing sport in terms of prize money, fan viewership and sponsorship revenue. “We are incredibly excited to form such a trustful and comprehensive partnership with the leaders in this space,” he said.
“They are at the vanguard of this exciting sector. By partnering with us, they have made a clear statement that they want to be the e-sports innovator with the most sophisticated, most engaging and most beneficial relationship with their data and those interested in that data.”
Image: ESL tournament event in Katowice, Poland
