Top 3 SPAC Targets – Sports

After a quiet stretch in the SPAC market, we pressed pause on this column. But with deal flow picking up, targets getting more creative, and sponsors back in hunting mode, it’s the right time to bring back one of our favorites: the Top 3 SPAC Targets. Read on to see who we picked for private targets in the sports industry.

Sports have been a popular sector for SPACs to name-drop in their prospectuses, and those that have carried through on that interest with concrete deals have generally made strong bets.

The signature transaction in this vein was Diamond Eagle’s forward-looking tie-up with DraftKings (NASDAQ:DKNG) in 2020. DraftKings has seen spikes above $70 as it has blazed a trail in the US’ digital gambling space and last closed at $23.21.

Other prominent sponsor teams have also dabbled in the sector, including dMY II, which closed its combination with sports data firm Genius (NYSE:GENI). Genius has also spent much of its public life trading above $10, but dipped recently following a mixed market reaction to a major acquisition.

Sports continue to pick up significant tailwinds with US consumers spending an average $1,122 on sports annually, according to a 2024 Bank of America study. Much of this is being driven by brand new channels that have opened up fresh revenue streams via gaming and prediction markets only recently.

This is also set to be a big year for sports in the air with the Winter Olympics wrapping up and the US hosting the World Cup. A Paradise (NASDAQ:APAD), meanwhile, is using its trust capital to launch a new kind of sporting tournament with its merger with Enhanced, which this Spring will run competitions between athletes that will be allowed to use performance enhancing substances.

Stats Perform Group

While competition is fierce among the online betting and prediction market players, there are several picks and shovels players that they all rely on. Those are the companies officially collecting the scores, stats and other data from sports matches that users are betting on.

This is the business model of Genius Sports and Chicago-based Stats Perform Group has its own slice of this market. It covers about 500,000 matches annually from 3,900 competitions and feeds data to major players like Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), bet365, Sky Sports, and EA Sports.

The company has also gotten out ahead of some of the fastest-growing sports with its Opta platform giving equal bandwidth to data collection from women’s leagues as well as the men’s game.

Beyond match data, Stats Perform provides league partners, broadcasters and advertisers insights on fan engagement and other metrics and users can pay for premium analysis features to visualize the games themselves.

All of this is by nature based around recurring revenue contracts that are likely fairly sticky as these clients would need good reason to completely switch what datasets undergird their systems.

With Stats Perform set to cover the World Cup this year for FIFA, it will be center stage should a SPAC decide to make a splashy move with the company. Its private equity owner, Vista Equity, might be thinking the same thing.

Vista first acquired the company 2014 and was reportedly considering an exit in 2023, but may have felt the market was soft. That’s less likely to be the case now.

Veo Technologies

Disruptive technology is being unveiled in smaller games as well. In fact, there may be even more money there.

Project Play estimates that spending in the youth sports industry will hit $75 billion in 2026, which is more than double the money flowing through the NFL. This spending tends to be more resilient to recession than other forms of live entertainment due to parental priorities and fixed funding streams.

Denmark-based Veo Technologies occupies a crucial position within that world as well. It has developed a range of cameras designed to be set up and manned by AI for panning movements to record matches and provide some instant analysis.

This can be used by leagues to broadcast their matches on the cheap and also study the footage for training, scouting and promotional purposes.

It has similarly turned this into a recurring revenue stream as it charges users subscription fees to operate the cameras, at fairly low entry points with the cheapest option just $35 per month. With add-ons and extra connected cameras, these contracts can range into the hundreds monthly for more complex demands.

Veo now has customers in over 100 countries and these even include many professional teams with about 4 million matches recorded via Veo to date.

It’s about time for it to make some sort of capital move as its last funding round brought in $80 million in 2022. This Series C also brought in a number of early-stage venture capital investors that will now be reaching the end of their usual investment cycles.

Global Sports Group

For an enterprising SPAC to really turn heads, it might have to get creative to pull off major deals in the sports space.

It can be complicated, for instance, to list an individual sports team due to league regulations and the returns for listed franchises have largely been a mixed bag. But, a more diverse portfolio approach might be able to capture the market enthusiasm for growth in sports without the micro ups and downs of a single team playing out in the market.

Private equity firm CVC could provide such an opportunity, as it owns minority stakes in several sports and individual teams, many of which it has assembled together in the Global Sports Group platform company.

Global Sports owns stakes in the three largest international rugby leagues, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), the premier Volleyball World federation, and the top soccer leagues in both Spain and France. Altogether, this collection reaches about 5 billion fans worldwide, and although it officially formed in 2025, it is made up of investments CVC has made over the past seven years.

Individually, each of these stakes could be difficult to exit, but CVC has been rumored to be among the private equity investors considering listing their aggregate sports investments. Formally merging them under one corporate banner last year may have itself been an indication that one big move for all is on CVC’s mind.

One of the company’s most lucrative flips already was its purchase of the Formula 1 racing federation in 2006 for $2 billion. It cashed out smaller stakes in F1 over the years before selling its last stake in 2016, reportedly making $8.2 billion on the moves in the aggregate.

One can imagine how a big deal involving a presence in international sporting events the world over would captivate some of the more ambitious SPAC teams. And, in the age of popular ETFs and listed closed-end private funds, retail would be nearly sure to bite.