Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Sportradar's financial results conference call for the third quarter ending September 30th, 2021. On the call today, we have Sportradar CEO, Carsten Koerl, and CFO, Alex Gersh. This call, including the Q&A portion, may include forward-looking statements related to the expected future results for our company. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a number of risks and uncertainties, which are described in our earnings release and other SEC filings. Today's remarks will also include references to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS. Additional information, including reconciliation of these non-IFRS financial measures, is provided in our earnings release. This conference call will be available for replay via webcast through Sportradar's investor relations website at investors.sportradar.com. Carsten will begin with an overview of Sportradar, followed by our most recent highlights.
Alex will then take you through a review of the financials before we proceed to Q&A. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Carsten.
Thank you, Sandra. Good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining our first earnings call as a public company. As some of you may be new to our story, I would like to take you through a brief overview about who we are, what we do, and the massive growth opportunities we see in front of us. Please note that this brief overview will make today's call a little bit longer than what we typically do going forward. I'll provide you an overview of our recent progress, the performance, and finally, I will turn the call to our CFO, Alex, for the financial review of the quarter and expectations for the remainder of 2021. Sportradar is a leading technology platform enabling next-generation engagement in sport and the number one provider for B2B solutions to the global sports betting industry based on and measured by revenue.
We provide mission-critical software, data, and content via subscription and revenue share arrangements to sports leagues, betting operators, and media companies. We have been at the forefront of innovation in the sports betting industry, and we continue to be a global leader in understanding, leveraging, and monetizing the power of sports data. Our mission is to enhance sports fans and engage them globally through our fully integrated technology and service platform. Sportradar offers one of the most robust and fully integrated sports data and technology platforms. We serve as a critical data infrastructure and content layer to the sports betting and media industry. On top of that infrastructure layer, we have built one of the most advanced and comprehensive software offerings. Our products simplify our customers' operations, drive efficiency, protect integrity, and enrich fan experience. We have the largest volume of sport data in the world.
What's so much more important is that we are continually innovating to use the data to provide valuable insights and develop products that move us higher up the value chain for our customers. Our end-to-end offering, integrated technology, and global footprint make us an important partner for our customers and deeply embedded across the sports ecosystem. For our over 900 sports betting operator customers, we cover more than 750,000 events annually across 83 sports, including live data coverage of 600,000 events across 37 sports. The breadth of our data offering and sports coverage is an important differentiator for Sportradar. We are the number one provider of data to bookmakers. We supply sports data to over 85% of all bookmakers in the United States.
Our offerings include pre-match data and odds, live data and odds, trading services, which we call MTS, as well as our AV content products. Our full suite of software solution includes managed platform services, betting entertainment tools, virtual games, and programmatic advertising solutions. We are the only one-stop-shop provider across the value chain in this B2B business. For our over 150 sport league partners, we provide across 900 betting operators and 350 media companies to distribute the data and the content globally to them. We give them greater reach to serve as an intermediary to the highly regulated betting industry. Importantly, we provide integrity services to more than 600 leagues, federations, and law enforcement agencies. These services help to ensure a fair playing field for all.
What is also critical is that our integrity services give us deep relationship with sports leagues who know that they can count on us. For over 350 media customers, including both traditional and digital leaders, we provide products and services to help reach and engage sports fans across all distribution channels. Finally, our newly formed Sports Solutions vertical completes our circle of offerings to meet all of our customer and sport technology needs and demands. This vertical leverages the power of automation through cutting-edge use of computer vision to help the sport organizations to better perform, the teams to better perform on the field, and increase profitability on the off-field actions. We are very excited about the recent acquisition of Synergy Sports and InteractSport.
Through Synergy, we have a strong presence in the world of coaching and analytics, dominating both the professional and college basketball and baseball. Through InteractSport, we have gained an immediate presence in the sport of cricket. We couldn't be more excited about Sports Solutions vertical, and we are focused to aggressively build our team and the computer vision experts to the best-in-class automated video production and data management solution. Now some words to our growth strategy. Turning to the growth strategy, we are in an exciting transformative time. Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision are changing this industry as many other industries. I started Sportradar more than 20 years ago, but, I have been in the business for far longer and never experienced the time as exciting as this one now, right now.
In addition to the digital transformation, the sports and media and the betting industry are converging, bringing together massive TAMs. Please see our public filings and slides in the presentation we have published for further statistics, how we view the TAMs. Finally, the U.S. is driving the pace of change with a market that is rapidly adopting legalization in sports betting. To capture all this opportunity, we are continually broadening our product portfolio to better serve customers and increase our touch points with the end users across the sports betting value chain. The more knowledge of the end user that we are able to collect, the more valuable our insights and platform services become to leagues, sports betting companies, and of course, also to media companies. These network effects also enable us to enhance our product portfolio, serving as a key element of our growth strategy.
Other elements of the growth strategy are the following. First, we capture growth in global markets. We intend to capture significant growth from new and existing markets around the world. We have the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the expected growth in various markets, especially the U.S., where the market was approximately $1 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow to approximately $23 billion at maturity in the next 10 years. Second, expanding the offers in the B2B products and services. We will continue to increase adoption of new and existing products to further grow our share of the wallet with the customers. We believe that our MTS and ad:s provide customers with significant value, and these products are currently underpenetrated in our existing customer base. We expect uptake of these innovative solutions to be higher.
Betting companies in the U.S. market will be primarily focused on gaining market shares and acquiring new customers. Third, we cover the entire end user journey to better serve our customers. We see considerable value in combining our deep knowledge of sports data with the increasing amount of user data which we collect across all of our products, such as MTS, ad:s, AV, and OTT, which allows us to better understand the entire end user journey. These insights will enable us to cross-reference end users from betting to entertainment and vice versa, improve user experience on behalf of our customers, and consequently build better products. We also believe that this knowledge, together with our technical platform and capabilities, will help leagues to get direct customer and sports fan access in the future. Fourth, we invest in alternative content, capabilities, and services.
We continue to expand our content offerings beyond live sports betting into e-sports, virtual sports, and gaming. We believe that our betting operators consumers are looking for a way to provide their customers with more variety and flexibility in their content offering. Alternative content is not dependent on live sport. It is becoming increasingly important, and COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of new categories of real and virtual sports. Fifth, growth of funnel capabilities and offerings. We believe that there is significant opportunity to provide advanced capabilities in the programmatic advertising market for betting operators. Bookmakers are expected to inject vast amounts of capital in this underpenetrated customer acquisition channel as they seek more efficient methods to acquire new customers. We believe that of the global universe of sport fans, approximately 20% are sport bettors.
We plan to increase engagement for all sport fans and better serve them by leveraging data and insights we have to the end user behavior and preferences, making ads one of the most sophisticated forms of digital marketing for sports. We're incredibly excited about this forward-looking roadmap, and that serves our growth strategy, delivering value to our customers and partners, and enables us to extend our leadership in the market we are serving. Now I'd like to discuss some recent highlights that show you how we are executing on each of the growth pillars and taking advantage of the strong demand environment. Today, the team in Europe worked hard till 3:00 A.M. on a milestone deal for Sportradar, which we just announced, and I'd like to say in this place, thank you to the team for this extra mile and effort.
We recently announced an expansive eight-year official deal with the NBA. As their exclusive partner, the league will use our wide-ranging technology capabilities to help the league further grow their market share in the U.S. and abroad. Together with the two years run rate of the existing deal, that gives us a solid deal of 10 years to develop future solutions in all the three business verticals, teams, betting, sport entertainment. Basketball is the largest U.S. sport in the world, with a popularity of round about 2 billion sports fans worldwide. The opportunities with this partnership with the NBA are really endless, and we are very excited. To further showcase the momentum of our business, we also won a landmark agreement with UEFA. After a competitive process, UEFA selected Sportradar as their exclusive collector and distributor for data and betting purposes.
This is incredibly exciting, given it's the first data deal ever for UEFA in betting. Soccer is the most bet-on sport in the world with a handle of EUR 850 billion each year, far exceeding the handle of American sports, such as the NFL, which is $41.87 billion annually. For those who might not be familiar with the terminology handle, it's defined as the amount of money in wagers accepted. Once again, EUR 850 billion is the handle in soccer, $41.87 billion in NFL on an annual basis. That shows how important this sport is. We also announced the multi-year extension with the ITF to serve as its official data partner. Second only to soccer, tennis is the second most bet-on sport in the world with a handle of EUR 140 billion.
We are proud that we are continuing our ten-years-plus partnership with the ITF. Finally, we secured important deals with the International Cricket Council and the LNB, France's top basketball league. These are just a few samples of how we are disrupting the market and apply our data-driven approach to the sport universe. We make continual investments to ensure that the data we are collecting is robust, reliable, and delivered with high speed and low latency. Computer vision is one area that is extremely exciting to me. Given the potential to capture so much data and to capture and quickly with precision, in the third quarter, we implemented the computer vision for Wimbledon and the U.S. Open matches. I couldn't be more excited about the potential for this technology.
I include my discussion around the data rights deal by addressing our position on exclusive data. We seek exclusive data deals only when the economics make sense. We also have access to enormous amount of data that we are able to monetize even if we don't have exclusive rights. I'm pleased to say that we have not lost a single betting client due to not having the exclusive rights to NFL data. We have kept our position as the preferred supplier for every U.S. betting operator and did not lose any existing contract. We were also able to extend long-term partnerships with the likes of FanDuel. Lastly, we achieved 99% of our planned NFL revenues budget for our U.S. media and the betting business. I mentioned earlier our ability to understand the end user journey as an exciting area of growth.
We intended to approach this opportunity through our ad:s business, which identifies the profile of sport fans, gives us rich insights for our customers who want to target them. This business really illustrates that the more data we have, the better we can do our job in delivering meaningful information to our customers. We are seeing good momentum achieving EUR 7.6 million for our ad:s business globally in the third quarter, of which our U.S. revenue total is approximately EUR 1.8 million in the same quarter. We launched ad:s globally in 2019 and only recently began to focus on the U.S. This is just the beginning as betting companies look to aggressively acquire new customers and more advertising comes online in other channels.
This quarter, we unleashed an important strategic partnership with Adomni, the leading programmatic digital out-of-home advertising planning and buying platform, integrating Sportradar's sport data suite offering into their demand-side platform. This allows brand marketers and agencies to do out-of-home campaigns that include content such as live betting, odds, and other sport data. Another very exciting area that demonstrates the value and the expertise we provide to our clients is managed trading services or in short form MTS. Since 2022, MTS has played an integral part in the U.S. wagering landscape. Our MTS offering is a sophisticated turnkey trading, risk, and liability management solution that helps betting operators boosting margins and profits while increasing efficiency and managing risks. Overall, we grew our MTS customers from 158 globally in the third quarter of 2020 to 192 globally this quarter.
We have been gaining strong attention this year in the U.S. In the third quarter, we signed a strategic MTS agreement with FansUnite that will allow the company to provide optimal real-time odds, providing more value to their customers. Like the other regions of the world that MTS operates in, the U.S. has a bespoke revenue share deal price configuration. Turning to AV services, this is an area where we have market leadership and expertise that would be difficult for others to replicate. Our value-added expertise helps sports leagues to do a digital transformation, create engaging content, and have additional revenue streams. Our AV revenue increased by 13% year-over-year to EUR 29 million in the third quarter, driven by volume growth as we were able to sell more matches and deliver new content.
Notably, our adjusted EBITDA in this segment increased by 220% to EUR 9.6 million, and the segment adjusted EBITDA margin improved from 12% to 33% year-over-year, driven by lower costs of some of the content. Finally, I touched on how important global markets are to Sportradar's growth, particularly in the U.S. We made significant investments here to capture the enormous opportunity, and they are paying off. For example, we announced a partnership extension with U.S. market leader FanDuel through 2028, which makes Sportradar the chosen data and odds supplier for U.S. sports. Sportradar provides FanDuel with access to the most comprehensive suite of betting products in the marketplace, which will play a critical role in aligning FanDuel's growth with the U.S. sports betting landscape to expand significantly over the next several years.
We also entered into a five-year deal with U.S. betting operator Bally's Interactive. Sportradar provides Bally's with access to its complete pre-match betting service, live betting services, and content solution portfolio. Bally's incorporates the data profiles as part of its ambitious expansion plan to become a leader in the North American sports betting market. In summary, I believe we are exceptionally well-positioned to capture the significant growth opportunities ahead and expanding revenues from our existing customers, acquiring new customers, leveraging the power of data to drive insights and innovation, and broadening and deepening our partner ecosystem. Also, we are very proud of all what we have achieved. We acknowledge that this is just a step forward in serving our customers, colleagues, and shareholders. These are exciting transformational times.
Operating a global business as the market leader, combined with the ability to make strategic investments as a result of our public listing, will unlock dynamic growth opportunities. I'm ending my section here and handing over to our CFO, Alex, who will discuss our financial results for the quarter and the guidance for the year. Alex, hand over to you.
Thank you, Carsten, and good morning, everyone. As Carsten already mentioned, we had a very strong third quarter of 2021 and an excellent nine months for the year. Let me take you through our quarterly results in detail, and then I'll provide the full- year guidance for 2021. Third quarter group revenue grew 30% to reach EUR 136.8 million. Now looking at the segmental revenue detail, our rest of the world betting revenue grew 24% in a quarter to EUR 78.6 million. This growth was primarily driven by an uptick in our higher value-add offerings, including managed betting services and live odds services, which increased 63% and 20%, respectively. As a result, the increase was as a result of increased turnover and volume as well as new customer wins.
The second segment is of course rest of the world AV revenue, and Carsten had mentioned it as part of his presentation. Just to reiterate, it grew 13% to EUR 29 million. This growth was impacted by COVID-related schedule changes that occurred in fiscal 2020. Adjusting for that revenue growth and those changes from 50%. This growth was driven by volume growth as we're able to sell more matches, primarily soccer and baseball, as well as growth from additional new content being sold to existing and new customers. Turning to the United States, we grew 119% in the quarter to EUR 19.6 million. This was driven by growth in our betting service as an underlying market and turnover grew.
We also experienced strong adoption of our ads products, as Carsten mentioned, both in U.S. media and positive impact from the acquisition of Synergy Sports. Turning to one of our favorite metrics, which is a group dollar-based net retention rate. This was standing at 128% at the quarter end, compared to 114% at the Q3 at the quarter end of 2020. Demonstrating continued execution of our upsell and cross-sell strategy and underscoring the quality of the products and services we provide to our customers. Now, a couple of words on the major cost items on our financials. Personnel costs for the quarter were EUR 51.3 million, an increase of EUR 20 million over prior year's quarter.
That result happened because we have about 600 more FTEs at the end of Q3 2021 versus Q3 2020, as we continue to invest in technology and product. We also introduced new stock-based compensation, and that is reflected in that number, as well as the reversal of temporary COVID cost savings in third quarter of 2021 versus third quarter of 2020. Other operating expenses were EUR 25.2 million, an increase of EUR 15.7 million over prior year. The increase was primarily driven by incurred costs for the IPO, compliance costs relating to operating as a publicly listed business in the U.S., and some M&A costs. Total sports rights costs decreased by EUR 9 million to EUR 28.7 million in the third quarter of 2021, resulting from fewer major sporting events in the third quarter of 2021 versus third quarter of 2020.
That again relates to the COVID changes that occurred in 2020 to many schedules, many league schedules. Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 20.9 million, as Carsten mentioned, euros. That's an increase of 21% versus Q3 of 2020. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 15% in the current quarter, a slight decrease compared to Q3 of 2020. However, reflecting additional IPO costs of approximately EUR 5.7 million incurred in the third quarter of 2021. Eliminating the impact of those IPO costs would result in adjusted EBITDA margin of 19%, reflecting our continuous ability to achieve operating leverage. A few words on the adjusted EBITDA by segment. Rest of the World betting adjusted EBITDA was EUR 44.7 million, up 36%.
Rest of the World betting segment adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 57% versus 52% in the prior year, driven by growth in higher margin services, which we've already spoken about. Rest of the World AV adjusted EBITDA was EUR 9.6 million, as Carsten said, up 220%. Rest of the World AV segment adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 33% versus 12% in the prior year, driven by lower cost of certain content. United States adjusted EBITDA improved by 24% to EUR -6.6 million. United States segment adjusted EBITDA margin improved from -60% in the third quarter of 2020 to -34% in the third quarter of 2021, reflecting the scalability of our business and clear path to profitability while we continue to invest in the U.S. market.
Turning to liquidity and cash flow. We ended third quarter with EUR 768.4 million in cash. Total liquidity available for us, including undrawn credit facility, was EUR 878.4 million. As of the end of the third quarter, total debt stood at EUR 436.7 million, which resulted in a net cash position of EUR 331.7 million. During the third quarter of 2021, adjusted free cash flow increased by 144% to EUR 32.9 million, which led to an adjusted free cash flow conversion rate of 158%. Now, just a few words on the outlook for the rest of 2021.
For the full year of 2021, we currently expect revenue in range of EUR 553 million-EUR 558 million, reflecting annual growth of between 36.6% and 37.1%. For adjusted EBITDA, we expect in the range to be EUR 99.5 million-EUR 101.5 million, representing a year-on-year increase of between 29.4% and 32%. With that, we are now happy to open up a call for questions. Operator, will you please open up the line for Q&A?
Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one from your telephone keypad and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. So that we may address questions from as many participants as possible, we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. One moment please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of David Karnovsky with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your questions.
Oh, hi. Thank you so much. You know, with the NBA, I was hoping you could provide some additional background on the deal. You know, why do this agreement now when it still had a few years to go, your initiative with the NBA? Can you just expand on some of the additional distribution rights you've acquired and, you know, do those start immediately or in 2023? Thanks.
Yeah, a good question, David. This deal was a long effort, and we discussed it since quite a while with our partner, and we're super happy that we could announce it today. The U.S. is undoubtedly the biggest growth opportunity, which we see in front of us, and we want to focus on creating value, so investments in the United States are our top priority. The NBA is the top betting sport in the United States by pre-match, but more important, by live. Live is something where we see a main trend in the United States, and we see a lot of opportunities to monetize here with our live odds and with our managed trading services products. This was the main motivation.
Looking now into the scope, we widened the scope enormously, so that includes tracking data. It includes a tracking system, so we can work now with our Sports Solutions vertical on new ways how we capture data, how we give that to teams, and how we create value with the sports fans, with new data which we have and the insights. The exciting thing with the NBA is, it's a real strong technology partner. The NBA tries to think years ahead, and the deal is constructed about a strong technology partnership with a focus on U.S. betting of course, but also internationally. I mentioned the 2 billion sport fans following the NBA globally. That simply fits perfectly to our profile. That's the range.
It's an extended deal, but the scope and the focus is of course on the United States with the betting opportunity.
Okay. Maybe as a follow on, Alex, any additional detail you can provide on the equity position for the NBA, and does that, you know, go to the league now or in two years?
The deal as we I think announced starts at 2023, so that's when things start. Obviously you know we have an agreement, and they will become an equity shareholder in Sportradar, which is really exciting for us. This is the kind of shareholders we absolutely want. That's really all, no other detail other than what we already discussed in the press release.
Thanks for the question.
Our next question is from the line of Thomas Allen with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Thanks. Just one other clarification on the NBA deal. In the old deal, you were the exclusive global provider, but you had a co-exclusive in the U.S., and I think China wasn't exclusive either. Does that continue, or you are exclusive for everything by yourself?
The headline of the press announcement says exclusive global data provider, and I hope that gives you enough clarification. There is an opportunity that the two partners, the NBA and Sportradar, looking for market innovation. If there are companies which need data to create innovative products, that is something which is always in the interest of Sportradar and of course of the NBA. That is the difference to the existing deal. I hope that clarifies the situation.
Okay, thanks. Just as my follow-up, a lot of the operators talked about a hold impact in the third quarter into the fourth, respecting that most of your contracts are not tied to revenues. Did you have a negative impact from you know, events going against the operators?
Alex, do you want to take this question, or should I?
Go ahead, of course.
I quickly take it. No, the opposite is the case. We had a very, very strong MTS growth. MTS is our product where we are closest on the profit of the bookmakers. We enjoyed a 71%, I think, year-on-year growth in that segment. There are always some ups and downs, but what has happened in the U.S. with the hold and profitability was not the trend worldwide. Worldwide, overall in this MTS product, that has leveled out very well for us and showed a strong growth and strong profitability.
Perfect. Thank you.
Our next question is from the line of Jason Bazinet with Citi. Please proceed with your question.
I just had a simple question. Can you just remind us how many of the leagues have sort of equity participation via warrants in Sportradar today? And how should we think about growth in fully diluted shares outstanding, you know, over the long term? What's a reasonable growth rate based on the agreements that you do have in place?
Very general statement, I think you will not see too many equity deals from Sportradar like we did it now with the NBA. The NBA is our most important partner, and was our most important partner from the scope and from the size and also looking to the extensive partnership. That was a very clear step for us to do this, to work with our partner, where we enjoyed in the last seven years a sensational cooperation, and it's in the sweet spot of our growth with the U.S. market. We have an equity participation with the National Hockey League on a much smaller range than the NBA.
You might see some smaller equity deals in the future here, not to the extent and scope, like we see it now or saw it with the NBA. We are super happy with this. We do not intend to really widen this too much and dilute the shareholders there. We see here a value creation for the NBA and for Sportradar. That's the reason why we did this.
Perfect. If I can just ask one follow-up, maybe I missed it in the release, but do you have the number of fully diluted shares outstanding as of the quarter?
Well, Alex gave you already the answer. We have to refer here to the release. It's fresh out of the press, and I think it is in the release.
I think if you mean in terms of, you mean the number of shares for Sportradar. You don't mean the. Or do you? Are you talking about the NBA?
No, no, for Sportradar.
Yeah. For Sportradar, I can tell you that we have total of 205,454,977 A shares. We've got total of 903,670,977 participation certificates, which convert into ten times less shares at some ultimately at some point.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Robin Farley with UBS. Please just give your question.
Great. Thanks. Two things. One is I just wanted to clarify your answer on the NBA data. Is it exclusive in the U.S. for NBA data, but not starting until 2023? In other words, it's still shared, it can be gotten with some others before 2023? Just wanted to clarify that. Then also just wanted to ask if you could give us a sense of either number of customers or percent of customers still using Sportradar for NFL data, just so we can kind of think about that opportunity, you know, kind of what opportunity there is outside of the exclusivity there. Thanks.
Hi, Robyn. To the first part, the old deal remains in place for the next two seasons, and there is no change. There are several providers for the U.S. live data piece. In two years, the new deal kicks in, and the new deal is different to the old one. With the new deal, the NFL, the NBA and Sportradar can decide if it makes sense for one or the other provider to get access to the data with the sub-licensing. I think that's very good for being innovative and developing the market, and we will take that decision together with our partner, NBA. The mechanics has fundamentally changed with the new deal. That's the first part of the question.
The second one with the NFL, we told already that we lost not one client in the betting market, and we recouped 99% of the revenues which we predicted in media and betting together, which shows that we have been able to compensate the loss of the exclusive data rights with the NFL by capturing data in an alternative way. From a client perspective, it's just exactly as we said during the roadshow, and this was expected, that the big operators, the tier one operators, they took the exclusive data from the NFL, also widened some of the partnerships there. The smaller ones haven't done this, so the smaller ones are staying with Sportradar. I think we are speaking about a little bit more than 10 operators here. Does that answer your question?
Yes. Just if I could clarify, when you mentioned that there's a decision in two years where you, it sounds like you have the option to have the NBA data exclusively. Is that, I assume there would be sort of an additional fee or something if Sportradar chose that option? Is that fair to assume?
No, no. That's not an option. You misunderstood me. There was a clear regulation between the partners, NBA and Sportradar, that we want to be able to give the data to some innovative companies. We keep that open and there is a partnership agreement on this, and there's a clear regulation in between which I can't go into too much detail now, but it means that Sportradar will be the very preferred supplier of NBA data to the U.S. marketplace in the next eight years from the season 2023 onwards. That was the reason of the deal. This is not an option where we have to pay more money. That deal is closed now for clear financial terms, and there is nothing on top of this.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Shaun Kelley with Bank of America. Please proceed with your questions.
Hi. Thank you, everyone. I just wanted to maybe dig in on, you know, some of the changes in economics you guys saw as a result of, you know, sort of some of the deals we saw announced with the NFL, you know, kind of back in September. Has any of those relationships that were announced with, you know, sort of other operators, impacted, let's call it, the pricing dynamic or the take rate on any other products or, you know, deals with leagues? Have you seen any pricing pressure on things that were sort of not NFL but might have been tied to or impacted by the NFL agreement that your competitor has out there in the market?
Of course, the market reacts on these things, and the market was asked to pay a significant premium compared to what they paid in the season before. That has an impact on the market, so there is a sensitivity on the bookmaker market on this, same as the bookmakers are sensitive on tax rates. In a very general way, we see really strong growing market in the United States. At the moment, this is more driven by capturing market shares. There is a cost sensitivity, but the cost sensitivity is probably not the main priority for the operators. That's what we see in general. Going now into the granular, as you know that the NBA and the Major League Baseball have a different distribution model.
They have a fee up front, which is paid to baseball and basketball, to get them access to the official feed, which is a difference to the NFL distribution model and to the NHL distribution model. For the NHL, we are the exclusive rights holders also for the next decade, for 10 years, same like we have it now with the NBA. We see that as a thing which we constantly have to review. We constantly have to see changes in this landscape. It's a very dynamic market. For us, from our perspective, it was very important that we secure long-term stability. That's what we did now with the NBA for 10 years and with the NHL for 10 years. We are very proud that also for a long time we are associated with the Major League Baseball.
Great. Thanks. Maybe just as a quick follow-up, you know, a lot of the sports betting operators in the U.S. are moving to or focused on sort of full tech stack ownership. Just wondering, I think you mentioned that you're seeing actually quite good traction with some of your MTS and MPS products. Could you just give us a little color on, you know, where that traction is, especially in the United States with clients or customers? Yeah, like, how does the sort of full stack ownership have an impact with some of the relationships with some of the bigger operators?
Yeah, super happy. We have to dive here really deep into the details, and I hope you allow me a minute to explain the environment. If we speak about some services which the bookmakers take in-house, you might mean platforms. There are very strong platform providers in this world. We have a platform. There are many others which are claiming to have a very good platform. That platform is doing the full service, that's the pay in, pay out, user acquisition, back-end, front-end, et cetera , PP, including risk management modules. Our MTS service is continuing to grow and grow. From a liquidity perspective, we are now on a year-by-year handle of round about run rate $15 billion. That's the tickets what we aggregate in the background.
The more tickets and liquidity you aggregate, the better you are in a position to use AI to compile what we call a fair price. That gives you, over the long term, if you have more liquidity and diversity, pricing power for this. I think that's not disputed from one of the players in the market. It's only the question, how quickly can you reach a position that your pricing power is big enough to generate alpha with the prices? We are working very hard on this, like I alluded in my speech. That's a very exciting territory for us. I think whenever we can provide a superior service to our clients, the bookmakers, they will not hesitate to take it.
There are some bookmakers which simply might see that there is an edge if they have their own platform. I think in a very general way, the platform is a software business, and sports betting operators are sports betting operators which have to do the branding, the marketing, the licensing, a lot of daily operations. I think there are very qualified companies doing software development and managing the modules like I just said it to you. That's our opinion about the debate of insourcing and outsourcing. I think it's simply weighted by who can provide the more efficient and better service that our clients can have a better offer and be more profitable. This is the decision point, and I hope I gave you an understanding about what is driving this. This is at the end, really liquidity.
Thank you for the detail.
If I can just add a little bit, you know, we have currently seven MTS customers in the U.S., right? So yes, they are very small, and yes, you would expect us to start with the small bookmakers. But the fact that there are seven of them that already see the value in the product is very encouraging.
Great. Thank you both.
The next question is coming from the line of David Katz with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to just talk about kind of a more long-term vision here, and I think that's, you know, largely what a lot of discussions with clients, you know, are about Sportradar. You know, if we look at the deals that have occurred, you know, yours with the NBA, you know, others with Genius, there's a, you know, a stake involved and a cost involved. How do you think this evolves the next, you know, five, 10 years? And, you know, is there a point at which the cost of these exclusive rights, you know, either stabilizes or becomes, you know, uneconomic? And, you know, help us in some qualitative way paint a long-term vision for this.
Very top level, I would be more concerned of a 51% tax rate, comparing it to what are the costs of official data. The market can decide on this really. The U.S. market has decided to value official data. I think that's a great decision. There are lots of pros in this. I don't think that internationally every market will follow now the example of the United States. Undoubtedly, there is an acceptance of official data and there is a participation of sport in this, which I think is totally okay.
I told you already before that we have not the intention to widening the scope here, and the NBA was a very, very special deal for us because it's absolutely on the core of where we want to go, and our visions are totally overlapping. Our vision is far beyond the data distribution. Our vision is the digital fan journey, the direct-to-consumer product to help to get into this channel with all the things, customized OTT, AV services which are in there, user profiling, hooking them up with merchandising, connecting them with sponsorships, sending the right message on the right channels, lots of opportunities around RSMs, et cetera, PP. That's a far wider vision why we did this deal. For the NBA, I think you can't simply replicate it and only focus it on the data, if we are looking into the future.
I think, the market will find the right balance here. Official data is something which the market has accepted in the United States. Sportradar is executing the vision and mission here very consistently. But I think from a scope for Sportradar, you will see not many of those deals following now the scope of the NBA. For the NBA, it made a lot of sense for us to align our equity with them, and have them contributing on our growth.
Understood. If I can just follow up, apologies if I missed it. The NBA stake that they're receiving, have you told us, you know, how large that is or how to calculate, how we might go about estimating that?
It's 3% in total, and it's vesting over 10 years' time, the deal term, in different tranches.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Next question is coming from the line of Michael Graham with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions.
Thank you. I wanted to just ask a high-level question about your AV business. You know, we hear all the time on the betting data side of your business that you are in a unique position, and clearly you have a complex product that is very difficult to replicate and that creates a lot of competitive moats for you. I just wonder if you could comment on your AV business and the extent to which you're able to build competitive moats around your AV business that, you know, would make it difficult for others to replicate.
I reported the growth numbers and Alex reported the growth numbers in ARR. I think if you look at this is really super strong. From a profitability perspective, we see that we get the scale in the product. It's all about building a portfolio, which is interesting for specific client groups and regions. There are not many real global betting operators, a few of them. They need a different product than operators which are focusing, for example, on the U.S. as a region. We need to ensure that we get the critical mass of rights for the regions and fitting that into the profile of our operator targets. That's a challenge, and we are on this journey for many years now.
We reached now a point that we obviously gain scalability here, and this is reflected in the numbers. The future of this service and what is really diversifying us is we are using now the technology which we gain from the profiling of users and putting that into the audiovisual service that we understand this is a customer who might be interested in baseball. He might be interested in the Lakers and he might be interested in LeBron. If we have that information, we can push him whatever video highlights or we can enrich during the video the offering and show him a specialized offering or the specific offering for his favorite sport, for his favorite team out of the bookmaker offering where we provide the service.
That intelligence to detect the user and to have the bookmakers to connect him with what he wants to do, he wants to stimulate, he wants to do a retention and acquisition, is the future development of this service. We started with this a couple of years ago. We are well on our journey, and that's very well reflected in the numbers, I think.
Okay, that's great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham. Please go ahead with your question.
Great. Thank you very much for taking the question. I was just wondering if you could detail just how much of the U.S. or global GGR the NBA accounts for, 'cause in your prepared remarks, I thought you said that the NBA was actually bigger than the NFL. If that's the case, is there any reason to think that the price you paid for the NBA would be lower than the rumored price that Genius paid for the NFL?
Look, I don't wanna compare prices, what we are paying and others are paying. We have a strong reason why we do this, and this is always commercially driven. We are looking to generate profit for our shareholders, and that's the reason why we are doing such deal. The NBA is following this general idea. Looking now to the league split, what I can give you is the breakdown for this year from the leagues and the split on the NGR in the United States. What I get here for pre-match is that the NBA is on the 21%, the NFL is on the 19%, and the MLB is on the 17%. The NHL is on the 4%. Then you have NCAA, the colleges and the others.
What I get from a league split in-play, that's the in-play revenues. The NBA is on the 25% and the NFL is on the 14%. Same like the MLB is on the 15% here. So what I read from these numbers is the NBA is clearly a betting sport for in-play. We believe that in-play gets more and more market shares. We believe that this is a trend, which follows very strongly what we saw in the international, especially the European markets in the last 10 years. As you might know, in the European markets, in-play is more than 70% of the revenues. At the moment, it's more upside down in the United States, but we think there is a strong acceleration here into live, and the NBA is undoubtedly a better live betting sport than the NFL is.
This was one of the decision drivers here because we believe of this market development. I think the numbers are speaking here for a more fast-moving sport. The NFL has different characteristics in this way. Globally, I referred on soccer as an $850 billion handle, so that's the complete turnover which is wagered on soccer, comparing it to $41.8 billion for the NFL. These are the official numbers from the last year. That's the comparison here, which shows the NFL, as a sport, American football, comparing it to soccer globally, is around about 5% of the handle volume. Of course, the UEFA is only a part of soccer. There are many other leagues included in here, but that should give you a feeling for the dimensions in the global sports betting market.
No, that's great. I appreciate all the color. Just as a follow-up, just interested in how competitive the bidding process was for the NBA. I'm assuming, you know, you and Genius Sports went pretty hard at it, but was there a sense that there were others involved as well? A big question that we get is, you know, what Endeavor and OpenBet is gonna try to do and if they could be a greater competitor in the space. Really if this is like a two-player bid for the NBA or if there was kind of a much broader, you know, bidding amount of bidders for the-
Yeah.
For the asset.
All I can say to you is it was a very intensive process. I, for myself, with the European team sitting here in Switzerland today, have been working on this till 3:30 A.M. this morning. I'm very happy that we got a super strong support with our U.S. team, but still there was a night shift also in America. It was a very intensive process. I don't wanna give you details on how that was from a competitive side, but we are very proud and very happy that we could secure this partnership and this long-term deal with the NBA, which was for us a key target for this year, and we achieved it.
Got it. Thanks for taking the questions.
Thank you. At this time, we've reached the end of the question and answer session, and I'll turn the call over to Carsten Koerl for closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much, and thank you all for your participation. We are very pleased with this quarter's performance, and we are excited for the opportunities ahead. We have a high-performing company and we will continue to focus on maximizing shareholder value. I like to thank many of Sportradar colleagues working around the world for their exceptional efforts and our customers and partners with whom we work seamlessly to deliver value to the market. Thank you for joining us on the call today, and I wish you all a great day. Thank you very much.