Tweet
Sports.com holds out for rescue
Owen Gibson
Friday June 7, 2002
Executives at Sports.com, the high-profile sports site that went into administration on the first day of the World Cup, remain hopeful of the business being rescued.
According to senior insiders, several companies are interested in buying all or part of the business, which runs the most visited sports website in Europe as well as supplying content to third parties including the Financial Times and AOL.
"There have been a substantial number of interested parties calling over the weekend and early this week," said one insider.
"The administrator's goal is obviously to raise as much cash for the businesses as possible - whether that's separately or together," he added.
One likely buyer is UKBetting, the online bookmaker that picked up former dotcom successes Sportinglife.com and Sportal for a combined sum of £3 and has put in a bid for troubled sports radio group Teamtalk.
"UKBetting is in the frame but there are also a number of other potential buyers from outside the betting arena," said another source close to the talks.
Any company coming in for the assets is likely to strip most of the costs out of the business immediately.
It has emerged that more than half the site's 100 UK staff were made redundant on Friday with immediate effect, with a skeleton staff of about 38 staying on to run the site until the end of June.
Most of the redundancies came from the head office in Hammersmith, with the Scottish and Irish offices also closing immediately. Sports.com also has an office in Leeds, where Sportinglife.com and Teamtalk are already based.
The site will run until the end of the World Cup. Staff hope this will be extended to cover Wimbledon in the first week of July in order to honour bets placed with the site and syndication contracts already in place.
Administrator Baker Tilley has divided the business into three parts since being appointed to run the business last Friday.
The betting, website and content syndication arms are likely to be sold off separately.
Each division had its own individual problems. The betting operation, launched 18 months ago to compensate for the advertising downturn, struggled to compete with the big bookmakers while the content syndication arm had to undercut heavyweights such as the Press Association and Reuters.
The Sports.com site itself, while popular with users, fell victim to the advertising downturn. The company was plunged into administration when one of the site's backers refused to provide further funding.
Although the operating company has gone into administration, the betting arm and the European sites in France, Germany, Italy and Spain have not yet entered administration. It is hoped that they will be sold as going concerns.
Last July, Sports.com raised a further £9.3m in funding from existing investors, including US company Sportsline.com, Soros Private Equity Partners and sports management giant IMG. At the time, Sports.com said the money would be enough to see it through to profitability.
Owen Gibson
Friday June 7, 2002
Executives at Sports.com, the high-profile sports site that went into administration on the first day of the World Cup, remain hopeful of the business being rescued.
According to senior insiders, several companies are interested in buying all or part of the business, which runs the most visited sports website in Europe as well as supplying content to third parties including the Financial Times and AOL.
"There have been a substantial number of interested parties calling over the weekend and early this week," said one insider.
"The administrator's goal is obviously to raise as much cash for the businesses as possible - whether that's separately or together," he added.
One likely buyer is UKBetting, the online bookmaker that picked up former dotcom successes Sportinglife.com and Sportal for a combined sum of £3 and has put in a bid for troubled sports radio group Teamtalk.
"UKBetting is in the frame but there are also a number of other potential buyers from outside the betting arena," said another source close to the talks.
Any company coming in for the assets is likely to strip most of the costs out of the business immediately.
It has emerged that more than half the site's 100 UK staff were made redundant on Friday with immediate effect, with a skeleton staff of about 38 staying on to run the site until the end of June.
Most of the redundancies came from the head office in Hammersmith, with the Scottish and Irish offices also closing immediately. Sports.com also has an office in Leeds, where Sportinglife.com and Teamtalk are already based.
The site will run until the end of the World Cup. Staff hope this will be extended to cover Wimbledon in the first week of July in order to honour bets placed with the site and syndication contracts already in place.
Administrator Baker Tilley has divided the business into three parts since being appointed to run the business last Friday.
The betting, website and content syndication arms are likely to be sold off separately.
Each division had its own individual problems. The betting operation, launched 18 months ago to compensate for the advertising downturn, struggled to compete with the big bookmakers while the content syndication arm had to undercut heavyweights such as the Press Association and Reuters.
The Sports.com site itself, while popular with users, fell victim to the advertising downturn. The company was plunged into administration when one of the site's backers refused to provide further funding.
Although the operating company has gone into administration, the betting arm and the European sites in France, Germany, Italy and Spain have not yet entered administration. It is hoped that they will be sold as going concerns.
Last July, Sports.com raised a further £9.3m in funding from existing investors, including US company Sportsline.com, Soros Private Equity Partners and sports management giant IMG. At the time, Sports.com said the money would be enough to see it through to profitability.