SportBusiness.com

iSport, which provides technology and consultancy services to the mass participation sports industry and represents more than 40 national governing bodies of sport in the UK, Australia and in North America, confirmed it was in negotiations with a “large player” in a similar market.
After negotiating with three parties over the past five months, the company is expected to make a decision early next week.
iSport CEO Craig Carracher told sportbusiness.com a merger would mean “two large players consolidating into a larger entity”.
“If it doesn’t, it means the UK market for technology providers and governing bodies will remain un-rationalised,” he said.
The merger talks come at a time when the company’s Australian operations, iSport Australia, recorded its first positive quarter of earnings since shifting to fee-for-service offerings. The company turned around a monthly burn rate of A$150,000 ($77,325/B87,487) in the process.
The company’s main offering is the iSport Advantage suite of products which includes web publishing tools, fixture and results management applications and a range of database management applications.
Carracher said: "We commenced our licence fee strategy and rolled out new inventories in Q2 2001. We initially projected rolling these strategies into the market in April 2000. However, the market collapse at that time required us to set back the fee for service roll out until 2001.
“We have been delighted by the fast take-up rates in Australia. Four new sports have come on board during this same period on licence fee models including lawn bowls, Australian karting, indoor sports and indoor cricket. iSport have also been appointed by several professional sporting bodies to develop and manage their online presence in Australia - this includes several Premier League soccer clubs in the UK.”
He added: "The participation sports market became very cluttered in 2000. We took a position that there would need to be further consolidation but only among the likely survivors. We have invested heavily in new markets like the United Kingdom and Canada which will now receive 100 percent of our attention as we deliver the proven success of the earnings model from Australia into these markets.”
Carracher was appointed CEO in March 2001 following a Board review of performance and ahead of a capital raising which was recently and successfully completed. He was the CEO of Volleyball Australia and a senior lawyer with the large city firm of Allens Arthur Robinson.