Marek Suchar, CEO and co-founder of Oddin.gg, argues that esports betting can be the bridge for sports bettors during this summer’s FIFA World Cup as operators seek to keep players engaged between matches.
Most sportsbook operators will spend more on World Cup 2026 marketing than on any other single event this year. And for the majority of each tournament day, they’ll have nothing football-specific to keep that audience engaged.
The investment makes sense; in France alone, the 2022 tournament accounted for 7.2% of all sports betting stakes that year. One event, nearly a tenth of a national market’s annual volume. The 2026 tournament will be the largest in history: 48 teams, 104 matches, 39 days. But the schedule works against most of the world’s operators. With kickoffs clustered between midday and late evening Eastern Time, a European operator on CET sees live football only from early evening into the small hours. Most of the day, and most of the bettor’s waking hours, there’s nothing live. Asian operators face the same problem in reverse.
Operators who fill those windows capture football demand that would otherwise migrate to adjacent platforms. Those who leave them empty, however, will lose that demand to competitors who won’t.
Why this World Cup is different with Oddin.gg
Previous World Cups had time-zone friction too, but European and Asian operators could at least build their engagement around locally convenient kickoff times. The 2026 format, 16 host cities spread across North America, removes that advantage. And it matters more now than it would have even a few years ago.
Every other form of digital entertainment now delivers content on demand, so when a bettor opens an operator’s book and finds nothing live, the gap feels wider than it used to. Live betting’s growing share of handle makes it costlier too. Engagement is now tied directly to real-time availability, and when fixtures pause, it drops immediately. Worse, bettors don’t wait. When nothing’s live, they switch to other apps, and getting them back once a session ends is significantly harder than retaining them.
For operators with significant football handle, even a modest retention improvement during off-peak hours can represent millions in otherwise-lost engagement across a tournament window. The 2026 World Cup schedule guarantees long stretches every day where European and Asian bettors have demand but no live matches to back it up.
Two gaps, two different solutions
Not all scheduling blind spots are the same, and treating them as one problem usually leads to weak solutions.
Short gaps (halftime breaks, post-match windows, rest days between group-stage rounds) catch bettors who are already engaged, already on the platform, already in a football mindset. These windows need fast, authentic football moments that fit tight timeframes and maintain momentum without trying to replicate a full match.
Long gaps (overnight off-peak windows, multi-day scheduling breaks, time-zone mismatch hours) present a different challenge entirely. The audience still wants football content, but there are no fixtures to anchor it. These windows need a continuous football narrative that gives bettors a reason to return and stay.
Each needs its own approach.
Filling short gaps: compression, not substitution
Short gaps need formats that are fast, participatory, and football-specific enough to hold attention without feeling like filler.
Oddin’s Penalty Arena was designed around exactly this constraint. An automated machine delivers penalty kicks toward a real goalkeeper on a regulation pitch, overseen by referees, with a verified outcome every 60 to 90 seconds. Before each kick, bettors vote on the target sector, directly influencing where the machine aims. Markets then open around if and how the goalkeeper will stop it. A five-round session format creates natural prop-style betting opportunities that slot into the windows between fixtures.
The participation element is what drives deeper involvement. When bettors influence the outcome, they care more about the result. That turns a gap-filler into genuine engagement, something that holds attention through halftime or the hour between back-to-back group matches rather than letting it dissipate.
Filling long gaps: keeping the football story alive
When no live football is scheduled for hours, the need shifts from frequency to story.
Oddin.gg’s eFootball format, part of its eSims 24/7 Fast Betting Content offering, fills that role. Real players compete head-to-head in fast-paced PvP matches that run around the clock, built around recognisable in-game teams. Each match lasts around eight minutes, creating a continuous stream of football content with genuine competitive outcomes, not RNG simulations. For European and Asian operators facing overnight or morning fixture-free windows during the World Cup, it provides a live football product that doesn’t depend on the FIFA schedule.
The Oddin.gg BetBuilder adds a further layer to each eFootball match. Bettors can combine multiple selections within a single match into a same-game combo bet, both pre-match and live, with odds calculated in real time. That moves the experience beyond simple match-winner markets and gives bettors a reason to engage more deeply with individual fixtures rather than passively browsing.
Preparing now for June 2026
Most operators have already invested heavily in live match engagement: odds delivery, market coverage, streaming, and in-play tooling are built around the fixture itself. That infrastructure is necessary but insufficient for a tournament where the calendar actively works against peak-hour engagement in key markets.
The competitive edge in 2026 sits outside the match window. Penalty Arena compresses authentic football moments into short, repeatable cycles for the gaps between fixtures. eFootball provides always-on, real-competition football content during the overnight and off-peak hours that the North American schedule creates for operators in other time zones. The underlying principle is the same for both: reduce the friction between wanting to engage and being able to engage in something that feels worth the bettor’s time. The integration and positioning work, however, needs to happen now, not in June.
Fixture calendars are not expanding, but football demand continues to grow. Operators who solve for the spaces between matches, particularly in a World Cup year where the time-zone math is working against them, are the ones who’ll retain the attention that would otherwise drift away. You can’t schedule demand, but you can prepare for the moments when the calendar can’t meet it.