Even with 25 states and the District of Columbia offering legal sports betting—and an impressive $20+ billion wagered in 2020, the U.S. sports betting market is relatively young compared to the more mature legal markets in Europe or Australia. Each new legal state requires a focus on marketing-driven player acquisition, but as fans pick their favorite sportsbook, 2021 may be the year that Americans bettors move beyond spreads to popular, retention-focused offerings, like in-play, player props, and request-a-bet.
In-play is a staple product in many established European markets, where official data suppliers provide sportsbooks with real-time statistics and odds update constantly as the action progresses. With in-play, fans watching at home can engage throughout a game, wagering on things like who will score the next goal, the final score, or the number of turnovers.
Neale Deeley, VP of U.S. Sales and Gaming at Sportradar, recently explained why in-play is so popular with European bettors, “In-game is the natural place to wager because you get to see whether your team is performing as you expected, you can react to price movements based on events on the field, and you can also give yourself that added interest in the game. I think it’s an extremely engaging product. For that reason, it is not surprising that it is dominating the handle and also the hold outside of the U.S.”
The popularity of in-play in the U.S. is set to grow as states adapt legal mobile betting and customers start to become more familiar with the concept. However, as U.S. sports make up a relatively small percentage of international betting markets, in-play products for the major leagues are not yet as comprehensive as those available for the big European soccer competitions.
The patterns of play and scoring in American football, baseball, and ice hockey are ideal for in-play making a wide variety of live markets possible. Challenges like the end-to-end speed of games like basketball make it more difficult to deliver markets such as “next scorer.” Leagues and data suppliers have been investing to not only improve their offerings in the U.S., but also attract bettors to their sport. The PGA TOUR, for example, entered into a partnership with IMG Arena to distribute the data worldwide in order to provide bettors with a deeper and more engaging experience.
Player props––whether season-long, pre-game, or in-play bets––are another tool that has delivered fan engagement for European bookmakers. Soccer fans watching an English Premier League match can back their favorite player to score, register an assist, be the first or last goal scorer, or against a host of other performance statistics. The amount of player, team, and match data available to operators means they have the capability to offer more than 1,000 different wagers on a single soccer game. While most will not attract much action from bettors, operators have become adept at selecting the right ones thanks, in part, to the popular request-a-bet functionality that many offer.
Joe Lee, head of GB&I - Sportsbook Trading for Flutter Entertainment’s Paddy Power brand, recently reflected on this, “customers are starting to tell us through that [request-a-bet] offering what they actually want to bet on. So this has been key for us, and that is what we’re using a lot of the time to understand what markets we should be offering.”
European bookmakers have found that player props are an attractive option for fans of the big four U.S. sports leagues in their customer base. At Redzone, a UK-based operator that specializes in American sports, 49.1 percent of all the bets on the 2019-20 NFL season were in player-related markets, with wagers on touchdown scorers particularly popular.
The data is already available for a huge variety of player prop markets in U.S. sports. For example, BetGenius’s NBA BetBuilder offers 400 market-types for every game, including hundreds of props. It may be only a matter of time before American bettors are most interested in wagering on Lebron James to record a triple-double in a playoff game or James Harden to be the top scorer when he faces the Rockets.
Key to the success of these engaging offerings in the U.S.—and the long-term sustainability of the legal market—is matching new wagering opportunities with responsible marketing of products and responsible gaming tools for customers.