Catapult Acquires Impect to Bolster Football Analytics Capability

Catapult Sports has acquired Impect GmbH in a deal worth up to €78 million, in a move designed to strengthen its capabilities in football scouting and tactical analysis. Impect offers cloud-based software for scouting insights, analyzing player performance across nearly 150 leagues and more than 40,000 matches annually. The acquisition adds a new dimension to Catapult’s existing performance and video analytics suite, aiming to deliver an integrated intelligence platform for clubs.

Catapult is known for wearable performance tracking, athlete monitoring, and video analytics systems. The addition of Impect’s scouting and tactical module allows Catapult to broaden from pure performance data toward decision-making tools for recruitment and match planning. This gives them a more compelling value proposition to clubs that depend heavily on player trading or smarter recruitment as part of their business models.

To facilitate the acquisition and subsequent integration, Catapult has launched an equity raising program, targeting institutional capital to fund the upfront commitments. The combination is expected to accelerate cross-selling into existing clients in football and adjacent sports, unlocking synergies by bundling performance, video, and scouting tools under a unified architecture.

Challenges lie in integration: ensuring the data models align, managing product overlap or friction, and maintaining continuity of service to existing Impect customers. Also, Impect’s performance-linked payments (deferred earn-outs) introduce contingent liabilities that depend on meeting milestones. The technology competition in sports analytics is intensifying, and Catapult must continue to differentiate its combined offering.

This acquisition sends a signal: analytics firms are evolving toward platforms that encompass both performance measurement and strategic scouting. For clubs, having a more unified dashboard between athletic output and recruitment insights may be increasingly compelling. In effect, Catapult is positioning itself to capture a larger share of the sports intelligence value chain by bridging performance and decision engines into a cohesive offering.