As the biggest revenue-generating World Cup in history has drawn to a close, we spoke to Jeevan Jeyaratnam, Chief Betting Officer at Abelson Sports, Borja Mata, Trading Director at Codere Online, and Paul Witten, Managing Director EMEA at SIS, to reflect on the tournament, from standout moments and infrastructure pressure to how results measured up against expectations.
What was the standout moment of this World Cup that visibly impacted betting activity or engagement?
Jeeve Jeyaratnam: It would be wrong to highlight just one point of impact, so I’ll mention three, but two are linked.
June 12, day two – USA 4-1 Paraguay. This statement performance by the co-hosts alerted not just the USA but the whole world as to the potential of the USMNT to compete in this tournament. As a supplier with a USA focus, this was a huge moment, accelerating engagement from a recreational point of view while focusing news and media coverage towards the event.
June 16, day six- with France, Norway and Argentina all playing on the same day, Mbappe (2), Haaland (2) and Messi (3) proceeded to score 7 goals between them. This primed recreational fan engagement ahead of …
June 22, day twelve – the trio performed the 2+ goals feat again, but this time punters were expectant, loading up on a three-way parlay at average odds of 100/1. Filling pockets so early into the tournament, no doubt helped the competition’s handle explode.
Borja Mata: The romance of the World Cup has long existed, but one of the standout themes was the emotional pull surrounding what may have been the final World Cup appearances of legendary players such as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luka Modrić, Manuel Neuer or Memo Ochoa for our Mexican customers.
The broader range of player markets gave customers more opportunities to engage with those individual stories by betting on goals, assists, shots and other performance statistics. This obviously was helped by the Golden Boot race for the ages, with Messi firmly at the heart of it, as the world’s best players certainly turned up this time round.
More generally, we also saw that betting activity was significantly higher in each territory whenever the local national team was playing, demonstrating the importance of that emotional connection.
Paul Witten: The opening ceremony and kick-off of the real-world tournament was very big for us. We saw more than a 30% jump in daily turnover for our eSoccer product with our major North American operators at that point, a lift that was then sustained throughout the tournament.
Our content drove consistent engagement day to day: whether it was a group-stage day, a knockout game, five World Cup fixtures, or just one, we still produced nearly 400 events per day and generated similar handle throughout.
That said, we did see a clear impact on betting activity when an operator’s home nation was playing. The USA’s match against Bosnia & Herzegovina, for example, triggered a flurry of post-full-time betting, contributing towards the highest hour of turnover we saw throughout the entire tournament.
With 104 games making this the biggest World Cup ever, did scalability and infrastructure matter more than ever when major fixtures were taking place?
BM: Scalability and infrastructure were certainly important, particularly due to the overall number of matches and the need to maintain a consistently high level of performance throughout a longer tournament.
However, in terms of matches taking place simultaneously, the busiest periods were not necessarily greater than a typical major domestic football weekend, when the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga can all be taking place at the same time.
The main challenge was therefore sustaining that operational readiness across the full tournament rather than managing one exceptional peak. You get different traffic certainly, with maybe some more casual bettors, but it’s focused on one event at a time.
PW: Within our sports sim product Competitive Gaming, we’re well used to running hundreds of games a day and thousands per week. We were able to expand our offering throughout the World Cup without a hitch, with trading margins remained strong throughout.
We’ve had really positive customer feedback, and it’s reinforced that scalability is a key selling point for our product. Delivering high levels of additional events focussed on major tournaments like the World Cup smoothly is strong proof that our workflows hold up under pressure, and it’s given us confidence to lean further into big events like this in the future.
JJ: To a point, yes, but the number of games was largely an irrelevance in terms of infrastructure. The real challenge was ensuring that systems were robust enough to cope with massive, concentrated demand.
A ‘normal’ Saturday during the European season features far, far more games running concurrently than a World Cup, but in terms of single game volume then the World Cup tops everything; certainly, for an operator outside of the USA.
Liability and risk, as well as back-end infrastructure, would have all come under huge pressure and I’m sure there will be operators reviewing how they can better handle correlated risk without putting the entire business at risk.
Did the final results track the pre-tournament favourites, and how did that affect margins or payouts for you/the operators you work with?
PW: In the H2H Global Gaming League, in which our in-house gamers compete, the onus is on the gamer rather than the real-world team, so a stronger gamer playing as Cape Verde should be more than capable of beating a weaker gamer playing as England, for example.
That means the ‘superior’ real-world teams aren’t automatically favourites in our match-ups, though throughout the tournament they did draw more turnover. Argentina, for example, were the most bet on team throughout the tournament, but also one of our most profitable!
JJ: From our point of view- as a player props supplier- we saw a number of things that we wouldn’t have predicted at the start (or we’d have had heart failure!). Goalscorers (not player shots) were the most popular player market by a huge distance – driven by the performance of the top stars.
A golden boot race with Mbappe (10), Messi (8), Haaland & Bellingham (7), Kane & Dembele (6) would be enough to scare even the most experienced trading desks and as a result, June was costly.
However, when the tournament reached the knockout stage the games became tighter and the goal rush slowed, meaning a very profitable end to the tournament and overall a margin close to that we would have expected pre-tournament.
BM: Broadly speaking, the final stages followed pre-tournament expectations, with Spain and Argentina, two of the leading favourites, reaching the final and Spain ultimately winning the tournament, while all four top ‘seeds’ were the four semi-finalists.
Naturally, the success of the favourites resulted in some significant customer payouts. However, there were also unexpected results and surprises throughout the competition.
Major events of this scale are ultimately about pricing markets accurately, managing liabilities effectively and maintaining a consistent approach to risk throughout the tournament, while consistently delivering an excellent betting experience.
