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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
Charlie Horner (00:01.474)
After a hundred and four games and three hundred and eight goals, the World Cup is over and Spain are the champions. With forty eight teams and more matches than ever, the twenty twenty six World Cup was billed as one of the biggest betting events of all time. But how did it turn out in reality? Did operators anticipate that most of the world's biggest superstars would have a brilliant tournament? That four top seeds all made it to the semifinals? Who are the sportsbook winners and losers?
Welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement solution for sports betting and iGaming operators. I'm Charlie Horner and today to discuss all of this and more, I'm joined by Everymatrix Head of Trading, Mark Wilson. Mark, how are you doing? Thanks for joining me today.
Mark Wilson (00:48.726)
I tell you, I'm great. It's been a long five weeks, but I think we're glad we've got through it and it was great. So, ready for the new season soon.
Charlie Horner (00:58.06)
Certainly was. It was a Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure it was a great tournament and I'm I I'm I gather that you're probably quite happy to have a couple of weeks of of it being slightly quieter until the Premier League gets underway again in a couple of weeks.
Mark Wilson (01:13.276)
yeah, it's very important after what we've just seen, a really intense five weeks. A few weeks off is nice, but I the new season is going to creep up on us faster than we realise.
Charlie Horner (01:25.974)
S it certainly will, yeah. I think Community Shield in a couple of weeks' time, I'm sure they'll be perfectly ready for that. But that's for another day. That's for another day. Let's let's jump into things because the World Cup was was huge and as as I said at the top, it's it was billed as one of the biggest betting events ever. in terms of major sporting events, ha just how big is the World Cup for for trading volume? D is there anything else on the sporting calendar that comes anywhere near the the World Cup?
Mark Wilson (01:32.322)
Can't wait.
Mark Wilson (01:55.351)
I think it's enormous really.
You can't really compare it in terms of, know, there's a five week period. There's no football competing with it. you know, football, you know, it is the number one sport for us globally, you know, in terms of betting volumes. So it's massive. You know, you get one off events that can, you know, as a one single event that can see, you know, incredible volumes, say the Super Bowl, the Champions League final, you know, the Grand National, but over a sustained period
five weeks where every game is an event you know you get the last sort of games in the in the group stages where they kick off at the same time but throughout the tournament you know every game has its own time and it's just there's complete focus on every match so there's not really anything like it for me
Charlie Horner (02:51.684)
Yeah, I I I agree and as someone who tried to watch as many of the hundred and four as possible. yeah, I can I can tell you that it's yeah, a a lot to keep up with. I I must admit, I didn't didn't manage an anywhere near the the hundred and four, but but there you go. we w like I say, there were there was so many games and more teams than ever, forty eight teams, but
we did end up with the top four FIFA ranked teams making the semi finals and then of those the the top two seeded teams made the final. is it is it safe to say that the World Cup was perhaps a bit consumer friendly? D do do you have any data on that?
Mark Wilson (03:32.867)
Well, I think it was consumer friendly in terms of the amount of...
games, amount of, know, the, like I say, there were all, you know, was no clashes kickoff times. think that consumer friendly, look, there was a lot of results that went against us in terms of favourites winning the top four teams, the top four ranked teams got to the semi-finals. So, you know, so in that sense, it was consumer friendly, but, you know, there were some great results along the way from, you know, from, for our operators.
the one that stands out was the Spain Cape Verde very early on in the tournament.
essentially the results were not perfect from a bookmaker perspective but we were really happy with what we saw and the top teams getting to the late stages of the tournament I think meant that the users were really engaged right to the end there was a narrative, the top players were there right to the end so it kept interest going to the final day
perspective if England got there even better but you know you can't have everything.
Charlie Horner (04:54.125)
Yeah, it wasn't to be. It wasn't to be. but yeah, y you're right, really, because th we were sort of in uncharted waters for this World Cup. We weren't entirely sure how the new format would work. I guess if you you you know if you sit there before the tournament and y you do your predictive bracket or your wall chart, you might have ended up with th those four semi finalists. But there were some surprises along the way. Like you say, I mean you're
Cape Verde were were a fantastic underdog underdog story and and there were others as well. You know, Norway getting to the quarterfinals and beating Brazil, Switzerland getting as far as they did as well. I think they were in the the quarterfinals. d d do results like that give you a bit of a boost or help operator margins just as you go throughout this tournament?
Mark Wilson (05:37.679)
Yeah, I mean, they're huge. I think that traditionally at a World Cup, we used to look at the games that would take place each day and, you know, the type of markets customers would bet, you know, the win draw win, the over and under two and a half goals, they'd have the favourites in accumulators for that day. So having getting a team beat on any particular day was very important because it's such a concentrated, you know, there's also mini tournaments within the tournament, if that makes sense. you know,
That's really important, but what we found on this World Cup is that the results, over and under goals, whilst they're still important, players are becoming more engaged with bet builders and in particular players and big, big players, they're including them in all types of bets. So we're almost diversifying our risk in some ways.
You can get the favourites winning but if certain things don't happen in the match it could still be a very good result for the bookmaker and we didn't see that in the past. think the final was an absolute perfect example of Argentina not having shot some target, Messi doing nothing, was huge. Whilst this has been an evolving way that customers are betting, think that during the World Cup we saw a real snapshot of how important this is about key players,
how they perform and what that means for bookmakers and I think that it will continue to be the case moving forward in my view.
Charlie Horner (07:16.855)
Yes, certainly. And we'll we'll dig a little bit deeper into the bet builders and things like that in the second half of the show. But I just wanted to stick on the on the big players trend because that was huge in this tournament, you know, Messi, Mbappe, Bellingham, Kane, Haaland, they all had brilliant tournaments. you know, if i even if you look at elsewhere on the pitch, like Rodery had a fantastic tournament and he he'd be a player that would attract a lot of attention. What what trends did you see on the Every Matrix sports?
platform on on the player level w was were players really highly engaged in betting on these superstars being as as good as they were?
Mark Wilson (07:54.969)
Yeah, very much so. was almost like I say, it was as popular as our sort of key markets. it was, you know, every game that, you know, had these, you know, real sort of superstars playing, know, such a high proportion of the bets involved them and more like in, you know, percentages of stakes that we had personally not seen before. So I think it's, you know, it's like a real kind of snapshot in time of where betting is, you
on football right now. knew that, you we're not saying anything new about bet builders, you know, taking off being important, but we saw a real spike during this World Cup that we hadn't seen before. you know, that was a key learning for us.
Charlie Horner (08:41.251)
Hm. Yeah, and d I guess we've got the last hurrah of the the big two, the two greatest ever, Messi and Ronaldo. They had differing tournaments, didn't they? I think safe to say that Messi outperformed perhaps even expectations that people had of him went a a as at thirty nine. And perhaps Ronaldo at forty one, maybe under under hit expectations.
Mark Wilson (09:01.518)
I think my sense was that...
I think that from what we saw, the punters maybe felt that it was maybe one tournament too far for Ronaldo. That was the sense I got. He was still very popular, but nowhere near as popular as Messi. Messi, everybody was betting him as though he was in his prime. Maybe he didn't quite play like that in terms of movement, but his stats, in terms of goals, he was right up there, wasn't he?
the customers are still latching onto anything messy related.
Charlie Horner (09:40.526)
And do you think that that kind of activity will continue moving forward as the next generation continue to shine? Like we've seen Mbappé become the the all time high record. World Cup goalscorer, Bellingham had a great tournament, Haaland, you know, kind of dragged Norway towards the the quarterfinals. Do you think that in in the post Messi and Ronaldo era that player driven bets are still gonna be as popular as they were in this tournament?
Mark Wilson (10:08.814)
Oh very much so. mean like I say, the way we've seen a big spike and you know, my generation and well, mean, yeah, it's Messi, it's Ronaldo, but for the younger generation of punters, the youngsters, they're going to have their new heroes. so I see no difference here. In fact, I just see it bigger and bigger.
Charlie Horner (10:35.705)
Fantastic. Well, Mark, we'll take a very short break and we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about the World Cup.
Charlie Horner (10:44.567)
Welcome back to iGaming Daily. And Mark, you know, we know that the World Cup is is sort of an incredible acquisition opportunity for for operators during this time. I guess, you know, you want to have a good month of trading or a good five weeks of trading, but it's a great opportunity to get players within the ecosystem. I guess ha the question is how do you how do operators sort of think about keeping players within that ecosystem now they've got them in?
Mark Wilson (11:15.31)
I think it's pretty much keeping the product right for, we've looked at the data, we've prepared for the tournament.
months before in terms of how we wanted our product to look. We wanted new markets, we launched lots of micro markets in plain time periods. We launched many more outright markets, we tried to enhance and improve our bed builders, our featured bed builders, the pre-built bed builders. So was very much preparation around how can we make sure our product is right.
How can we make sure our uptime is as high as it can be in play? And all those things, we just wanted to get our put to an optimum level. I think that moving forward, we've looked at the data and we've we've took learnings like I say from the bed builder, we now know what we think works well. We just want to continue that into the new season. we've got a month, probably just less than a month.
and engage them customers. It's a fairly short break, so hopefully they're still engaged and ready to go next season.
Charlie Horner (12:32.931)
Yeah, you you you said in the first half of the show that that it's it's no surprise really that bet builders are popular. That's that's not a new learning, but w were bet builders still sort of the most popular form of betting or were w did you see the a particular uptick in in play betting throughout this tournament or w was traditional pre match bets the most popular?
Mark Wilson (12:53.304)
Well, I think that we a really big increase in bed-builders and we saw a really big increase in all kind pre-match markets around players, around, you know, just sort of...
sort of new innovative markets about what plays we'll do during the match. think that the in-play sort of percentage of our turnover dropped slightly, but that could be very much time-based for the European market. A lot of the games weren't an ideal kickoff. And I think that the pre-match markets that we offer have become so, I would say so much improved since, say, the last World Cup with all these new player marks.
that I think that we saw a big increase in customers having their bet pre-match, sitting back watching the game with all these, know, with such a, you know, a better range of markets basically. But that's what we saw anyway. Some of that could have been time-based, but we'll kind of learn from that in the next few months if things just drop back to, you know, get back to normal soon.
Charlie Horner (14:01.891)
Mm-hmm. Sure, I just wanted to ask about the featured and pre-built bet builders. because I think they're it really interesting and a an a an innovative new feature that that we we're seeing on sportsbooks. I'm just curious about how those are pre-built and what factors go into making a a pre built bet builder popular among players. Is it just getting pop the big players in?
Mark Wilson (14:23.054)
It's very much we look at the date.
Yeah, we look at the data, look what's popular and then we try and build them in basically an automated way for our operators so that they're not spending too much time building them themselves. then we can then, and very much it's player focus, cards are really popular. So we look at what's popular. We take inspiration from say Premier League fantasy competition. We can see what kind of is really popular there. And then we try to get the
in our feature bet builders, make them as automated as we can but also react to team news, which players are doing particularly well. it's kind of like a semi-automated, semi-looking at which players are in form. basically the customers, they want to bet on players and things that are newsworthy basically. And you can really look at the top leagues and really focus your concentrations on those top leagues.
Charlie Horner (15:26.691)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Look, we've we've spoken a lot about the the fun, the interesting stuff, the the the nice packaged bet builders and and the top players. But I think it's really important to talk about keeping keeping the platform live, the robustness of the platform, because at the end of the day if if you don't have the uptime, then you can't
you can't offer the the fun bets on on all the top players and the top teams. So how is every matrix sports built to be robust during, you know, heavy periods like the World Cup and and how was that kind of reflected in in the platform performance during the World Cup?
Mark Wilson (16:04.43)
I mean, this goes back to the sort of core of our philosophy in terms of the sports book and a B2B sort of offering, know, in-play uptime is a key metric for us. We measure it, we look at it, and we need to make sure that we are higher than say industry standards and we can, you know, we optimize it as much as possible. During the World Cup, it was about 98 % uptime, you know, so given all the goings on, you know, and the stoppages, that, you know, we think that's very good.
But it's a metric that we look at and we're always trying to improve.
Charlie Horner (16:39.99)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's it's certainly really important because yeah, like like I say, you can't really offer those fun markets w without that uptime. So yeah, certainly an important metric to to keep an eye on. look, Mark, I've really appreciated your time here and in enjoyed listening to your insights. Just as we come towards the end now, I just wanted to ask
You know, we we said at the start of the show that you've got a couple of weeks now just to have the downtime. Take the learnings from the World Cup and apply that into the new season. It is only a few weeks away though. so as the domestic league campaigns go again, what can our listeners expect to see from you in the coming months, at every Matrix Sports and and how are you going to apply those learnings to the new season?
Mark Wilson (17:21.752)
Well, I think it's just, you know, so we're working now taking those learners from the World Cup. And I think that, you know, the key one was around the bet builders, the featured bet builders, looking at them and seeing how quite, popular they were and saying, right, how can we enhance them? Can we add markets into them that will be even more popular? Can we make sure that, you know, the featured plays play the, the, the, you know, these popular plays that we've seen time and time again.
Can we add more context into them? We give our users stats on the players, how many shots on target they've had for instance in the last five games, for example. So we're really looking at all those metrics and saying, how can we improve this for our operators so that we've looked at this World Cup and we know what's popular and we'll make sure that that's at the forefront of our offering for the new season.
that soon.
Charlie Horner (18:23.478)
Yeah, fantastic. Well, let's hope that the Premier League season, the La Liga season, all the European leagues can show showcase the the star power that we've seen during the World Cup. and I'm looking forward to see how seeing how that is reflected in in the betting odds for the new season. But for now, Mark Wilson, head of trading and every matrix. Thank you very much for joining me today. Thanks to Optimove for supporting the show as always, and to our listeners.
Thanks very much for tuning in to today's episode of iGaming Daily and come back tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news.