Sportradar against Genius Sports: the data layer under the sportsbook

Neither company takes a bet. Both decide what an operator can price, how fast, and on whose authority. Operators talk about sportsbook suppliers as though the front end were the product. Underneath it sits a data layer that determines which events can be priced at all, and two companies dominate that conversation. Sportradar sells the data plus, for operators without their own trading desk, the trading itself as a managed service. That makes it a supplier and an outsourcing partner at once, and it means the same company's integrity monitoring is sold to the regulators watching its customers. Genius Sports competes on official rights: exclusive league data agreements rather than collection speed alone, extended by its 2021 acquisition of Second Spectrum into tracking and visualisation. The structural question for an operator is which dependency it prefers — a supplier with an outsourced trading arm, or one whose leverage is the rights it holds.