Leonard Blavatnik’s Perform Group is set to acquire sports data firm Opta for £40 million (€47m). The digital sports rights group, which owns assets including Goal.com and real-time data firm RunningBall, made a share placing to raise £115 million to fund the acquisition.

Founded in 1996, Opta, which has clients including BSkyB, USA Today and the NBA, collects statistics on players, such as where goals are scored from and amount of ground covered.

Perform is to pay an initial consideration of about £40m for Opta, with a further “management incentive” of up to £7 million based on performance.

“We are excited by the acquisition of Opta, which will significantly enhance our existing sports data offering, particularly to the media industry and to sports fans,” said Oliver Slipper, joint chief executive of Perform.

Opta made revenues of £12.5 million and £1.3 million in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the year to the end of March.

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