The global sailing series has signed Smarkets as its first official sports trading partner, formalising its entry into regulated betting markets across the UK, Ireland and Sweden.
SailGP has signed its first official betting partner, agreeing a three-year deal with Smarkets which will see the exchange operator become the championship’s Official Sports Trading Partner.
The agreement announced on February 26 grants Smarkets betting integration rights across the UK, Ireland and Sweden, and marks the first dedicated sports wagering partnership in SailGP’s history. It also extends to a team-level sponsorship with the Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team, as well as the Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix in Portsmouth.
The new partnership represents a formal step in SailGP’s commercial strategy to integrate sports betting into its fan engagement model, following its initial entry into the betting market in 2025 when odds and markets were made available via global operators ahead of its New York event.
Andrew Thompson, Managing Director of SailGP, said the league’s race format and data capabilities made it well suited to live trading markets.
“SailGP is built on speed, precision and data – and the nature of the racing with multiple short-course races creates compelling, highly-competitive action every time our teams take to the water,” he said. “By working with Smarkets, we’re able to use the sophisticated real-time data behind SailGP to unlock new ways for fans to engage with the competition, while continuing to grow the championship around the world.”
Founded as a high-performance sailing league featuring national teams racing identical F50 catamarans, SailGP has positioned itself as a technology-forward property, emphasising broadcast innovation, live data feeds and close-format racing designed for short attention spans and digital consumption.
Smarkets, an exchange-style prediction market operator, will use SailGP’s real-time race data to power in-play and pre-race markets across its licensed territories. The company’s Founder and CEO, Jason Trost spoke exclusively to Insider Sport to provide details on the new partnership.
What made SailGP the right property for you to form an official betting partnership with at this stage?
SailGP is a data-rich, high-performance sport and that’s exactly where exchange betting thrives. Real-time boat telemetry, live positioning, multiple short-course races per event. The sport generates the kind of live signals that make in-play trading genuinely compelling. Prices on our platform are driven by real-time information and competition between participants, not bookmaker margins. SailGP has the data infrastructure to make that work properly. And we got there first. This is SailGP’s first ever dedicated sports trading partnership, which tells you something about the opportunity we saw.
How does this deal fit into your wider strategy for expanding into emerging or fast-growing sports?
Smarkets is a fintech and trading company that lets people trade events. We’re not a traditional sportsbook looking to put odds on anything that moves. We go where the data is good enough to build genuinely transparent, fairly-priced markets…. SailGP has that. It also has international reach across markets where we already have strong regulatory standing and where exchange-style trading has a real audience. The fit is structural, not just commercial.
What evidence or audience behaviour convinced you that SailGP has genuine betting potential?
SailGP’s audience skews younger, tech-savvy, and internationally mobile – that’s a profile that indexes heavily toward exchange-style trading rather than traditional betting. These are people who are comfortable with real-time data, used to trading interfaces, and frankly a bit sceptical of opaque pricing. We also looked at engagement patterns across SailGP’s broadcast and digital platforms. The sport already generates the kind of second-screen behaviour – tracking boat speeds, wind data, positioning – that maps naturally onto live trading. We didn’t need to manufacture the engagement loop. It was already there.
What types of markets or bet formats do you expect to resonate most with SailGP fans?
Race winner and event winner are the starting points, but the real opportunity is in-play. SailGP races are short and data-dense – conditions change rapidly, leads shift, and the telemetry is updating constantly. That creates natural trading moments where prices move on real information, not just sentiment. We expect the in-play race winner market to be the flagship product. But over time, as the data integration deepens, there’s scope for more granular markets – leg winners, margin of victory, head-to-head matchups between specific boats. We’ll build those out based on what the data supports and what the audience responds to.
How will you approach modelling and pricing for a sport that is still relatively new to betting ecosystems?
This is where the exchange model really shines over a traditional sportsbook. With a bookmaker, you’re relying on a single pricing team to get it right from day one, and for a new sport, that’s a tall order. We have both. Smarkets runs its own market maker, Hanson, which provides continuous liquidity and pricing from the outset. But those prices are also competing against the broader market: real traders bringing their own analysis, their own models, their own views on the race. So you get the best of both worlds. Consistent, available pricing from day one, and a market mechanism that gets sharper over time as participation grows. The official data partnership with SailGP is what ties it all together, making sure both our market maker and the wider market are working from accurate, real-time race information.
What integrity safeguards and data-sharing processes will underpin this partnership?
Integrity is foundational, not an afterthought. SailGP already has a robust data and integrity framework, and our partnership includes formal data-sharing protocols and monitoring arrangements. We work closely with sporting bodies and regulators across every market we operate in – that’s been core to how we’ve built Smarkets since 2008. Exchange platforms also have a natural transparency advantage here. Every transaction is visible. Unusual trading patterns are detectable in real time. It’s a more auditable model than traditional bookmaking by design.
How do you see betting enhancing the SailGP fan experience rather than distracting from it?
I wouldn’t frame it as a distraction. What we’re offering isn’t really betting in the traditional sense. It’s sports trading. A fan tracking a boat’s position while watching prices move in real time based on actual race data is more engaged with the sport, not less. And critically, the pricing is transparent. The average margin on a traditional sportsbook bet is around 10 percent, meaning your expected return is ninety cents on the dollar before the outcome is even decided. On an exchange, prices are set by the market. That’s a sharper, more transparent way to engage and it respects the intelligence of the SailGP audience.
Which markets or regions do you see as the biggest growth opportunities for SailGP wagering?
We’re starting in the UK, Ireland and Sweden. These are markets where Smarkets has strong regulatory standing and where we’re already the number two betting exchange. We’ve always taken the long, regulated path. We build properly in markets where we have the right infrastructure in place and we grow from there. Durable companies are built by working with regulators, not around them. That’s been our approach since 2008 and it’s not changing.
What does being an “official” partner allow you to do that you couldn’t do otherwise?
Access to SailGP’s real-time race data is the most important thing. That’s what lets us build markets driven by actual information rather than generic pre-race lines. Prices should be driven by real-time information and competition between participants. You can’t do that properly without being inside the data. The official structure also gives us integration rights across the championship, on-site presence at events, and a partnership with the Emirates Great Britain team, the defending champions. That combination of data access and fan-facing presence is what makes this meaningful.
How do you see betting partnerships evolving for niche or emerging sports over the next five years?
The sports that will attract the most sophisticated trading partnerships are the ones investing in data infrastructure now. It’s not about the size of the audience; it’s about the quality of the data and the willingness to build proper commercial and integrity frameworks around it. SailGP understood that. I think you’ll see a split emerge: sports that treat betting as a logo on a perimeter board versus sports that treat it as a genuine product integration powered by real data. The second category is where the durable value sits – for the sport, for the trading platform, and for the fan. That’s the model we’re building with SailGP and it’s the model we’ll look for elsewhere.
For SailGP, the deal signals a further evolution of its commercial model as it seeks to diversify revenue beyond traditional sponsorship, broadcast rights and host venue fees. Sports betting has become an increasingly important pillar for global leagues across football, cricket and motorsport, particularly in markets where regulation permits direct operator partnerships.
The inclusion of the Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team adds a domestic activation layer, particularly around the Portsmouth event. Sir Ben Ainslie, CEO of Emirates GBR, said the partnership aligns with the sport’s emphasis on data-driven performance.
“Data is critical in SailGP and Smarkets will allow fans to access real-time data and engage with our sport in a new and innovative way,” he said.
The announcement comes ahead of the KPMG Sydney Sail Grand Prix, scheduled for 28 February to 1 March 2026, as the Rolex SailGP Championship resumes its current season.
While financial terms were not disclosed, the three-year structure suggests SailGP is seeking longer-term alignment with betting operators rather than event-by-event arrangements. The focus on the UK, Ireland and Sweden reflects established regulated betting markets with mature exchange trading communities.
SailGP’s formalisation of a betting category partner mirrors a broader trend among emerging sports properties seeking to embed wagering as part of their fan engagement ecosystems. For a league built around fast, multi-race formats and real-time performance analytics, the integration of trading markets offers a potential avenue to deepen digital engagement, particularly among younger audiences accustomed to second-screen interaction.
