Soft2Bet is putting its partnership between its Betinia sportsbook and football manager Diego Simeone to extensive use.
The Malta-headquartered sportsbook and casino solutions company secured a partnership between its Betinia sports betting platform and Simeone in September last year.
Betinia announced today that it has revamped the ‘Football Manager’ platform it had been developing with the Atlético Madrid manager serving as the face of the product.
“Diego Simeone represents what football fans admire most: commitment, focus, and the will to improve,” a Betinia spokesperson commented.
“This campaign brings that attitude into Betinia through a football manager journey where progress is clear, loyalty is rewarded, and every session feels personal from the first moment.”
The company intends to ‘move beyond traditional betting’, in its words, via the Football Manager platform, which adds another layer of fan engagement to its sportsbook.
The platform functions like a video game, with players progressing from ‘beginner’ to ‘legend’ status by building a squad, creating formations and making matchday decisions.
Progress is measured by form, goals, assist, clean sheets and momentum, with additional side missions and challenges. The product’s development comes amid the wider adoption of gamification across the international betting industry in recent years.
The inclusion of video game elements to gaming, like point scoring and competitions, has become a lot more widespread across the betting industry. Free-to-play games have also become widespread.
Partnering with Simeone was an interesting move for Soft2Bet. Partnerships between footballers, or football clubs, are of course nothing new to betting, with countless clubs in the English Premier League alone possessing betting partners.
The same is true of Simeone’s current working location, Spain – though partnerships need to have an international focus and cannot target Spain due to the country’s ban on betting sponsorships.
Simeone’s team, Atlético, has an international partnership with betting operator K8, which is its Asian partner, for example. A partnership between an operator and club manager, such as Soft2Bet’s Betinia and Simeone, is much more unique.