Sportal break up

Sportal, the UK-based sports website, has sold its brands – sportal.com and sportal.co.uk – to ukbetting.com for £1. The company’s domain name and technology was bought by ukbetting.com for a £190,000. Not having sold its assets to ukbetting.com Sportal can continue to operate supplying sports content to other sporting media interests.

Sportal raised funding from investors that include 3i, BSkyB, Dawnay Day Lander, and Europe@web.

This latest move represents a marked decline in Sportal’s fortunes. In the spring of 2000 it turned down an offer of £275 million from Canal Plus to buy the business. Immediately following this event the tech slump hit Europe and Rob Hersov, founder of Sportal and co-founder of Ant Factory, found his window of opportunity had disappeared.