B2B sportsbook supplier BETBY has released a detailed report into betting behaviours between the 2022 and the 2026 FIFA World Cup, offering operators a look into how consumer expectations have changed in time for this football season.
Alongside presenting all the numbers, the ‘10 World Cup Insights for the Next 10 Months of Football’ report poses one crucial question – what sits behind the numbers?
With the study, BETBY aims to answer this across every key layer of engagement – from match-result betting and player props, sportsbook features and products, to promotion campaigns.
The results are clear, with BETBY adamant in one thing – players have started to interact with football differently.
A glimpse over the data shows that only 18.84% of World Cup bets have come through the dedicated tournament page. Meanwhile, desktop saw 13.14% of engagement but brought 30.24% of World Cup turnover.
With this football season just starting, BETBY’s 10 insights can still be utilised by sportsbook operators to optimise them into growth over the next months.
Some of the topics covered in the report reveal what was behind the player engagement that drove x2.96 stake growth on average, what were the biggest shifts that affected markets and player props in the last four years, what does the source of World Cup bets mean for event discovery, what kept players engaged between World Cup matches, and more.
Stefanos Karakidis, Business Development Director at BETBY, said: “Most operators came out of the World Cup with better numbers, but few could explain why. The majority viewed the tournament primarily as an acquisition opportunity, when that was arguably the least interesting aspect of it.
“The tournament reached four out of five of our players, yet generated less than half of all bets. It was everywhere, but it wasn’t everything on the sportsbook. That’s why we set out to uncover the insights that many operators might otherwise overlook.”
Meanwhile, the report also unveiled that in the periods when World Cup betting activity slowed down, Betby Games – BETBY’s esports feed – maintained a constant betting cycle, signaling the capability of BETBY’s product portfolio to keep bettors engaged.
For SBC News, Kirill Nekrasov, Head of Innovation and R&D at BETBY, concluded: “Betby Games accounted for a meaningful share of total sportsbook activity during the tournament, while eWorld Cup helped our partners keep football content running during periods when the real schedule was quieter.
“For operators, that means looking at the full tournament day rather than only the match windows. If you know where player attention is going to be and you have the right content ready around it, you can extend engagement much further than the final whistle.”