Tomáš Petera wants to bring Tour de France, NBA games to Czechia

Tomáš Petera, co-owner of the bookmaker Tipsport and owner of the Perinvest Group, spoke on The Forbes Show podcast about his plans to turn sport in Czechia into a real business — up to and including bringing the Tour de France or NBA games to the country.

Through the Swedish company Sportway Media Group, in which he is a co-owner, Petera has developed a technology for broadcasting sports matches using AI-powered cameras. Thanks to this technology, the entire Danish football league, for example, is broadcast with almost no camera crew at the stadium. “There aren’t forty people at the stadium for the broadcast — there are only three,” the entrepreneur explains.

Petera’s group of companies numbers around twenty firms with combined annual revenue of roughly one billion crowns, and specializes in organizing sporting events. One of his Czech projects, the sports channel Sporty TV, was recently sold to the Prima Group, which turned it into its own sports channel.

Petera’s company has long worked with the American ice hockey league, the NHL, and it is thanks to him that the Ice Hockey World Cup will be held in Prague. Now the businessman has set his sights on even more ambitious projects — bringing the Tour de France or top-tier NBA games to Czechia. It’s true, he admits, that this is far more complicated and expensive: “The NBA as an organization is much richer than the NHL,” says Petera, explaining that the business model behind Global Series games requires compensating both teams for the home-game revenue they lose, and in basketball those sums are four times higher than in hockey.

In Petera’s view, Czechia lacks an understanding that major sporting events are, first and foremost, a business that brings the country serious revenue. For instance, the costs of the Ice Hockey World Championship run to around 500 million crowns, while the total revenue linked to it approaches a billion — thanks to transport, accommodation for guests, catering and VAT on tickets.

The businessman also points to a shortage of sports infrastructure in the country — not only for major tournaments, but for children’s sport as well. A former successful tennis coach, he is convinced that Czech sport is missing precisely the entrepreneurial approach that he is now trying to introduce through his projects.