Congratulations to my friend John O’Connell for selling Opta Sports Data to Perform for c£40m. John has been Chairman since 2011.
Opta was originally known as Sportingstartz when setup by Toby Russell in 1996. As the name suggested, it collects sport data such as which football players achieved the most passes. Its customers included BSkyB, National Basketball Association in the US as well as Barclays Premier League and England & Wales Cricket Board in the UK.
Opta had revenues of c£10.8m and PBT of £345K in the year to July 12 – a real turnaround from previous years. Close Ventures backed the company in 2008 before they themselves were acquired by Albion; the current backers/sellers. The buyers, Perform, are a quoted media business which IPOed in Apr 11 at 260p and have nearly doubled since. They recently bought operations like the online football portal Goal.com. Last year they bought Runningball for Euro120m – a pretty similar company to Opta.
Of course, whether either company is a tech company or a media company is a moot point. But I thought it worth a mention as so many HotViews readers know sports fanatic, tech entrepreneur and thoroughly good egg John O’Connell. John made his fortune as the founder of Staffware which was sold to Tibco for £123m in 2004. I got to know him well from the Prince's Trust and the ITC. John sits on several other tech boards; most recently appointed as the Chair of EG Solutions.