Sports betting has become omnipresent in its short time since its been legalized; however, things are only getting started. Boardroom sat down with top executives in the space to discuss the future of the industry.
Sports betting has never been more ubiquitous in the United States, with commercials and promotions becoming nearly impossible to avoid while watching your favorite team. And we’ve still barely scratched the surface of how big it will get here in America, with Texas and California still fully offline and Florida limited to just one operator.
At CNBC x Boardroom’s Game Plan conference Tuesday in Santa Monica, leading executives from FanDuel, DraftKings, Fanatics, and Sportradar discussed the future of the industry in one of the day’s most intriguing panels. After the its conclusion, I was able to sit down with two leading industry executives, FanDuel President Christian Genetski and Sportradar Founder and CEO Carsten Koerl, to elaborate on the biggest innovations we’ll see in sports betting in the US over the next 12-18 months and how betting integrity is being monitored and regulated as confirmed instances of — and the potential for — fraud and scandal grow.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
The Personalization of Sports Betting
Although legal sports betting has become widespread across the United States in recent years, it’s still a relatively nascent industry. What became clear during Tuesday’s panel was how far behind American bettors’ user experiences are than their more established European counterparts. Betting companies like FanDuel are making efforts toward narrowing that gap.
“One of the mega trends and innovations is hyper-personalization,” Sportradar’s Koerl told Boardroom. “You’re going to need to know who’s sitting on the other side, and there is so much work to do and so many opportunities compared to where we sit at the moment.”
For example, if you’re a big soccer fan logging into your FanDuel account on a fall Saturday morning, Genetski said, you shouldn’t primarily be seeing college football wagering options on the main “splash” page.
“Everyone’s focused on [personalization] because it’s what users are coming to expect,” Genetski told Boardroom.
Over the next year-plus, bettors will get more curated content, insights, and parlay options based off of their favorite teams and even their favorite players. So if you bet on and root for Caitlin Clark, Patrick Mahomes, or the New York Yankees, your betting homepage will accurately reflect your interests and tendencies. While this certainly isn’t the primary driver of revenue for betting brands, it definitely drives engagement and interest, Koerl said.
The creation of a more personalized experience will do far more than merely catering to users’ preferences. By meeting the users where they want to be, companies will enable more opportunities in real-time as the trend toward the percentage of bets being made live and in-game will only increase. It’s already 70-80% worldwide, per Koerl, with microbetting on specific in-game outcomes like whether the next football play is a run or a pass or if the next baseball batter will walk or strike out accounting for 7-8%.
However, this new frontier highlights how reliant these betting companies are on others in the global sports ecosystem. Microbetting presents a major revenue generating opportunity for sportsbooks, but also a massive technological challenge. It requires lightning fast streaming capabilities to keep up with consumer demands, with many factors out of betting companies’ control. If a play or a point in your favorite sport has already been played by the time you want to live bet on it, that’s not exactly a way to create or maintain customer satisfaction. Luckily for sports fans, leagues are motivated to solve this latency issue not just for the fans but because they also have partnerships with both the streaming partners and the betting companies.
“They all have the same need,” Koerl said.
He believes as streaming lag becomes a smaller issue, microbetting will grow in popularity, making personalized home pages for bettors on FanDuel and everyone else all the more necessary and resonant.
Maintaining Betting integrity
As sports betting has proliferated across the US, so have gambling-related suspensions. Jontay Porter’s lifetime ban from the NBA and Tucupita Marcano’s lifetime MLB ban earlier this year are obviously the most prominent examples, but more than a dozen players across the four major American sports leagues have also been suspended for varying lengths over the last couple of years for lesser offenses.
“We have to remind people that this is the regulated system working,” Genetski said. “These incidents in almost every high-profile case started with operators flagging it.”
The way leagues and operators manage betting integrity and are able to quickly identify irregularities and potential malfeasance is largely thanks to Sportradar’s proprietary technology used by the NBA, MLB, NHL, Formula 1’s FIA, UEFA, NASCAR, and more than 200 other governing bodies. Just like Sportradar helps manage risks and supply real-time data that drive the live odds you see across most major sportsbooks in the U.S., it uses this AI technology and supplies it to more than 85 leagues and federations for free to ensure leagues and competitions around the world remain fair and scandal free.
But as sports betting grows, there will inevitably be a corresponding allure for athletes to illegally benefit from their positions of power on the playing field. It’s why both Koerl and Genetski agreed that collaborative education involving betting operators, leagues, teams, and agents teaching these athletes about the perils of illegal gambling is still the best collective way forward to maintain a fair playing field for all involved.
“This has been a learning period for players,” Genetski said, “to understand the rules of their league. Some leagues can’t bet on anything. None can bet on your own sport, but some can bet on others. It’s getting people comfortable with all these rules and regulations.”
While the 21+ rule in legal betting states takes a vast majority of NCAA athletes out of the equation. FanDuel has proactively created educational resources, including the Trusted Voices initiative that produces video tutorials aimed at parents to discuss what sports betting is, the legal age, and how to talk to their children about it. Because as sports betting grows and evolves across the country, the entire industry would suffer if what happens on the field wasn’t fair and equitable for all.
Read More:
