Founded by Rob Hersov, and backed by BSkyB and Silvio Berlusconi's Fininvest among others, the company, originally called Pangolin, acquired rights to host a many official websites of Europe's leading football clubs (including Real Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan and Bayern Munich) as well as lower-profile sites across a number of other sports.
[citation needed] In the summer of 2000 Hersov was weeks away from selling the company to Vivendi Universal for £270m when market sentiment changed and the talks collapsed.
[1] Despite this, The Sunday Times named Sportal the No.1 e-business in the UK and it came out top in an e-league compiled by the web consultancy, Bathwick.
But as the dot.com bubble burst, Sportal's size and lack of strong income streams quickly started to cause problems.
By March 2001 the company was in trouble and two rounds of redundancies saw two thirds of the staff laid off and savage spending cuts implemented.