Cracking the World Cup Code

Darren, by the final whistle, Sportradar processed around 350 million betting tickets. What does a dataset of that scale reveal that an individual operator might not see?

It gives us a much more holistic view. The 350 million tickets come from numerous jurisdictions, so we can see betting activity and different appetites across Latin America, Africa, Europe and North America.
Latin America, for example, has demonstrated a particularly strong appetite for player props. They have been a primary betting focus across almost every match. We expected the World Cup to produce more player-centric betting globally, and it helped that so many of the leading strikers performed well during the tournament.

The breadth of the dataset also allows us to identify and respond to issues more quickly. If there is a problem with odds, market availability or latency, our perspective across 250 operators enables us to react faster.

How does betting activity compare with the 2022 World Cup? Is the growth simply a result of having more matches?

It is difficult to make a completely direct comparison because the 2022 World Cup was played in November and December, but we have seen significant growth. Ticket volumes for this tournament are more than 80 per cent higher than in 2022.

Crucially, that is not simply because there have been more matches. The average number of bets and average turnover per game have also increased significantly. We anticipated growth because the wider industry has expanded over the past four years, but the increase exceeded our expectations.

Has the expanded 48-team format kept bettors engaged deeper into the competition?

The tournament broadly followed the pattern we expected. The group stage was extremely intensive, with match after match, before engagement became more concentrated during the knockout rounds.
Allowing three teams to potentially progress from some groups reduced the pressure around certain matches, but the additional knockout round was interesting. It generated the same type of engagement we would traditionally have expected from the last 16 onwards. The expanded format did not dilute interest as the competition progressed.

Did the different time zones have a material impact on betting activity?

There was inevitably some impact, particularly for European audiences faced with late-night matches, but it was not especially significant within the activity we observed.

We operate globally, so activity was not simply weakening in one market when matches were being played late there. Betting remained fairly consistent across the regions. We would need to conduct a deeper analytical review to determine whether there were more subtle changes between pre-match and in-play betting, but we did not see a major shift during the tournament.

Did newer regulated markets approach the World Cup differently from mature markets?

Newer markets were more likely to view the tournament as a major customer acquisition opportunity and, in some cases, adopted a more aggressive approach. However, that was not entirely different from what we saw in established markets. Operators everywhere recognised this as an opportunity to compete strongly for customers.

At a tournament of this level, information about injuries, team availability and relative strength is widely available, so operators can be more confident and competitive with their pricing.

Player props became an important point of differentiation, particularly in Latin America. We saw strong interest in narratives built around players to score, passes, assists, corners and goals within particular periods of a match.

Were there any teams or storylines that produced unexpected betting patterns?

Cape Verde was the story of the tournament for me. They disrupted the market when they secured a draw against Spain, having gone into the match at around 12/1.

There was heavy interest in Spain’s attacking players to score, but Cape Verde kept them out. They continued to impress beyond that match, while the story surrounding their goalkeeper and the growth of his social media following was fantastic.

The African nations generally performed very well. Although none progressed as far into the tournament as some might have hoped, they made a major contribution to the competition.

How has the balance between pre-match and in-play betting evolved since Qatar 2022?

Live betting has been central to the industry for a long time, so I would not say the World Cup created a fundamental change. We continue to see more than 70 per cent of turnover and tickets coming from live betting. It’s how many people now engage with top-level sport, whether it is football, basketball or tennis. Betting acts as a second-screen experience. A customer watches the match, sees a pattern developing and responds to it – perhaps by betting on a player to score during the next 10 minutes.

In-play betting is already firmly established, but it is also becoming stronger within newly regulated and developing markets. Processing hundreds of millions of tickets creates a significant technology challenge. Where was the greatest strain?

Volumes are growing, as are customer-service demands and the need to process transactions and deliver data in real time with increasingly low latency. We have grown alongside those demands and prepared for them by adopting technologies, including cloud infrastructure, that allow us to scale. We encountered very few technology issues during this World Cup, which is something we are extremely proud of.

Availability comes first for our sportsbook clients. We must be able to deliver the services for which they rely on us. During this tournament, I believe we demonstrated a very high level of consistency and quality.

With so much automation and live data, where does human expertise still make a difference?

The operation is not entirely autonomous. We still have a large team working across production, data validation, pricing, odds and the offers being delivered to clients. There is automation supporting those processes, and we are making extensive use of AI within Managed Trading Services, particularly for identification and automated player profiling. However, we still need people to protect quality, support clients and manage exceptions. People are working around the clock, 24/7. We are proud of our technology, but we are equally proud of the people behind it.

The World Cup was described as the industry’s biggest stress test. Were operators sufficiently prepared?

The feedback from our clients, together with what we observed from their products, suggests that the vast majority were well prepared.

Operators understood that success was not simply about having the correct odds on their websites. Their services and systems had to remain available, their bonusing had to work correctly and their products had to attract the right customers for the right reasons. Our MTS clients were ready for the tournament. Although the World Cup is a huge event, delivering at scale is what sportsbooks and their suppliers do throughout the year. The bigger challenge was how each operator could stand out, which becomes a question of marketing and acquisition.

What lasting effect could the tournament have on football and sportsbook engagement in the US?
We have said ahead of previous World Cups that football could finally take off in the US, but this tournament feels significant. Colleagues in our New York office were watching the matches and were highly engaged, while US sportsbooks reported very positive activity from their customers.

The country also has Lionel Messi playing there every week. If the combination of Messi and hosting the biggest football tournament in history cannot increase engagement, it is difficult to know what will. Football may never become as large as basketball or American football in the US, but I am confident it will be bigger than it was before the tournament.

What is the principal trading lesson operators should take from World Cup 2026?

There is room for sportsbook products to become more aggressive and more personalised. Adjusting prices to reflect the specific liability of an individual sportsbook should not be seen as a weakness. It is an opportunity to provide customers with a better overall product. Rather than protecting a larger margin across the board, operators can offer more competitive prices that reflect the bets and liabilities actually coming into their book.

From an MTS perspective, that is where products such as Alpha Odds can help operators scale while delivering a more fluid, individualised and responsive offering.

How much of the record engagement can operators retain after the tournament?

We do not generally see engagement fall off a cliff after a World Cup. The 2022 tournament took place during the domestic season, so customers moved almost immediately from club football into the World Cup and back again. This tournament has followed a more traditional summer schedule, so activity will inevitably fall for a few weeks before the Community Shield and the major European leagues return. However, I expect the new season to begin from a higher level than we were seeing before the World Cup.