Sportal

» see sportal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sportal is a name almost nobody remembers attached to work a great many people saw. If you loaded the official site of Juventus or Bayern Munich around the year 2000, you were on a platform built in london by a company you had never heard of, which had bought the new-media rights to those clubs the way a broadcaster buys a match.

There was never a turkish edition and no turkish club was in the portfolio, so the only route it had into my part of the world was through other people's leagues, over a 56k line, loaded slowly and mostly to check a score. That is the honest distance here. I was a student in ankara and Sportal was a rights business in london with a valuation attached to it.

Rob Hersov, a south african with a family fortune behind him, started the company under the name Pangolin. Sources put the founding at 1998 and at 1999 and nobody has bothered to settle it. The idea was clean enough for the period. Football clubs had enormous audiences and no idea what a website was, so a company that could build one and sell the advertising against it would own the most valuable unclaimed ground on the european web.

For about eighteen months it worked. Then it did not.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The money came from the sort of names that make a business look inevitable. BSkyB took a stake. Bernard Arnault put money in, and so did Fininvest, which is Silvio Berlusconi's holding company and therefore AC Milan's owner, which is one way to acquire a client. The valuation was $170 million in december 1999, and in the summer of 2000 the Sunday Times named Sportal the number one web company in britain.

At the top it had more than 300 people spread across europe and beyond it as far as australia, running official sites for Real Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan and Bayern Munich along with the new-media rights to the South African Rugby Football Union. The sites were good. That was never the problem.

~ the deal that did not close ~

In the summer of 2000 Hersov was weeks away from selling the company to Vivendi's Canal Plus. The reported figure is £270 million in some accounts and £275 million in others, and either number would have made the founders rich and the investors whole. The market turned before anything was signed. Nothing else in this grave matters as much as that.

What followed is the standard shape of a dot-com company with a large payroll and no revenue. By march 2001 two rounds of redundancies had taken two thirds of the staff. An emergency injection from the investment house Dawnay Day Lander kept it running through the summer, and a further round of investor cash in august bought a few more weeks. The advertising market it needed in order to survive had stopped existing.

~ what one pound bought ~

On thursday 1 november 2001, reported by the Guardian the following morning, Sportal gave up looking for money and sold. UKbetting, a small online bookmaker that had listed on AIM that year, paid one pound for the domain names and the trademark, and £190,000 for the technology and the user database. Most of the 120 people still employed lost their jobs.

The detail that stings is what UKbetting said it wanted. Not the journalism, which it would produce itself through its own PA SportingLife subsidiary, and not the platform either. It wanted the list. Peter Dubens, its executive director, said the value was in the users, "dedicated sports fans" who would "help us drive betting revenues". A company that had spent three years and tens of millions building the best football websites in europe was worth exactly one pound, and its mailing list was worth a business plan.

The brand came back in 2002 as a broadband video portal and turned up in india later in the decade. The domain is dead now.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »