Webook Takes a Majority Stake in Smartmove and Plants a Lisbon European HQ — 30-Year-Old Sports-Ticketing House Behind Sporting, FC Porto, FPF and Liga Portugal Gains a 17-Million-User Saudi Platform Tie

Saudi Arabian technology group Webook has acquired a majority stake in the Portuguese sports-ticketing and fan-management firm Smartmove, the two companies announced on Friday. The deal makes Lisbon the operational hub for Webook's European push and gives the 30-year-old Portuguese house its first capital injection from outside Portugal. Deal size and valuation were not disclosed.

Smartmove — full corporate name Smartmove, Serviços de Mobilidade S.A. — has spent three decades quietly building the ticketing, season-membership and fan-loyalty plumbing for some of Portuguese football's largest clients. The Lisbon-based firm runs ticketing and membership infrastructure for Sporting Clube de Portugal (Sporting CP), Futebol Clube do Porto (FC Porto), the Federação Portuguesa de Futebol (FPF, Portuguese Football Federation) and the Liga Portugal de Futebol Profissional (the professional men's league). General Director António Precatado has led the company through its product evolution from box-office systems into a full digital-fan-platform stack.

Webook, the Saudi side of the transaction, has built a consumer-facing booking platform that the company says covers more than 17 million registered users across 180-plus countries and processed in excess of €25 million in ticket bookings last year. The platform's verticals span sports, live entertainment, tourism and experiences — the broad bucket Saudi Arabia's leisure-and-entertainment policy has pushed capital into over the past five years.

The strategic logic on Webook's side is straightforward. Lisbon gives the group a European operational base from which to push into the wider continental sports- and entertainment-ticketing market, with a built-in client portfolio of Portuguese top-flight football names that doubles as a sales reference. Smartmove's three decades of relationships with Portuguese clubs and federations are easier to acquire than to build, and Portuguese engineering salaries remain materially lower than the equivalent Madrid, London or Berlin reads.

The strategic logic on Smartmove's side is different. The Portuguese firm has been operating in a market segment — sports-and-events ticketing — where the global incumbents (Ticketmaster, Eventim, SeatGeek) have outscaled the Iberian players on both technology budget and bargaining leverage. Webook's capital and 17-million-user platform give Smartmove a way to compete at platform scale without giving up the Portuguese client relationships it spent three decades building. Webook said the combined entity will expand the Lisbon engineering team and develop a new generation of AI-powered antibot and antifraud systems for ticketing — the category-defining technical challenge for the sector as bot-driven scalping has hollowed out primary-market margins.

The deal lands inside a broader trend of Gulf capital moving into European sports and entertainment infrastructure, but Smartmove is unusual in that the asset bought is not a sports rights holder or a club — it is the back-end software stack that keeps the rights monetisable. The Saudi push has tended to start with visible, marquee transactions; the Lisbon move points to a quieter, infrastructure-first phase that is harder to read from the outside but compounds faster operationally.

For the Portuguese tech ecosystem, the transaction is a rare example of an established, non-Web-Summit-era Portuguese software house being recapitalised by an international buyer at majority-stake scale, rather than the venture-capital growth-round model that has dominated the country's tech M&A flow over the past decade. Smartmove was founded over 30 years ago, predating the post-2010 startup-era cohort. Webook's choice to acquire rather than build sends a signal about how international capital reads the maturity of the Portuguese sports-tech segment.

Neither side announced a closing date for any remaining regulatory steps. The two companies described the deal as completed, with operational integration starting immediately under António Precatado's continuing management of the Lisbon entity.