CEO Simon Westbury takes stock of where Sport Generate is situated on its development trajectory and shares some eyebrow raising figures about the performance of the supplier’s products.
What is Sport Generate’s biggest challenge right now?
The real challenge for us is building momentum across three different products. I liken it to starting a car. Turning the engine on and getting the ignition going in the morning is when it works the hardest.
Then, once the car is started, going from a standing start to 10mph is the most difficult part, but going from 10mph to 20mph is easier. I’m currently driving three separate cars with the sales team, and some are a little ahead of others. In a perfect world all would have the same momentum but that’s not life, life isn’t perfect.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m never satisfied. If we’re smashing targets or not smashing targets, I’m not happy. I read on LinkedIn about Sir Alex Ferguson demanding a certain level every day in training. We’re not in a bad position at Sport Generate, but my insatiable appetite is to push forward.
How’s product development coming along?
We’re adding new features for esports including widgets and integrating some external stats providers to enrich what I think is the most beautifully designed esports product on the market. Esports and odds feeds is an environment where we’re having to take more official data which means speaking with official data providers to arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement.
That’s less of a product challenge and more of a challenge around official data and big companies spending a lot of money for data rights, so we need to find a way to work constructively with them. We have a very good base product and are collaborating with Sportradar and Genius Sports to expand our odds feed for partner operators.
We’re reselling our in-house and unique content Cyber Masters and our Rocket Masters Cup brands to them, whilst EA Sports’ Volta is being replaced by a new format called Rush in the upcoming FIFA 25 which will be interesting.
How are these products impacting the bottom line?
We were looking at some data the other day and whilst I know these things are boring and it sounds like a sales picture – it’s not meant to – but across our biggest customer’s network, we provide 18 per cent of events yet accounted for 52 per cent of bet amounts and 46 per cent of GGR.
And we’re not talking small numbers either. I can’t give exact numbers but in terms of bet amount we’re talking over €200m since January across the network. We’re accounting for over 50 per cent of that from just 18 per cent of the events.
We really need to be out there banging the drum creating that momentum I spoke about.
