Bet365 branches out into real-money fantasy sports

Bet365 has rolled out fantasy sports competitions for real money ahead of the new Premier League season.

The offering, which includes season-long and daily fantasy options, comes four months after the Stoke-on-Trent operator inked a deal with fantasy sports and betting provider Scout Gaming Group – the largest in the supplier’s history.

The ‘Fantasy Sports’ tab currently features prominently inside bet365’s app, sitting to the right of soccer, racing, greyhounds and tennis.

The main season-long competition with a £4.25 buy-in currently boasts a prize pool of £21,250, with the single-entry game attracting more than 3,000 teams so far.

The rake on entry is 72p, which means bet365 is taking 20% out of the prize pool as a fee. The winner takes home 10% of the pool (£2,250) while pay-outs go down to 635^th position.

There is also a game with a buy-in of £42.50 and a “High Roller” competition which costs £467.50 to enter. The latter currently has 13 entries.

A half-season game which lasts until November when the World Cup kicks-off has drawn almost 4,200 entries thus far at £17 a pop.

As well as competitions on individual matches, bet365 will be offering other sports besides football, namely tennis and US sports judging by the multi-sport icon used. Golf’s Wyndham Championship is currently up on the site.

Users earn points depending on the on-field performances of their selected players who must stay with a set budget of £100m for the season-long and half-year competitions.

With more than nine million players of the FA’s official free-to-play Fantasy Premier League competition, bet365 is looking to tap the extensive potential customer pool.

Private betting on the Fantasy Premier League game is common among the high-stakes poker community.

However, paid-for fantasy sports has struggled to gain much traction in the UK among the masses, unlike the US where daily fantasy sports (DFS) exploded a decade ago in the absence of legal sports betting.

DraftKings, the leading DFS operator in the US, has offered DFS football competitions and other sports to UK players for more than six years, albeit it with limited success.

FanDuel – the main rival to DraftKings – also launched a product built from the “ground up” in the UK back in 2016 but closed down the offering a year later to focus on its core business in America.

Bet365 being the largest bookmaker in the UK means it has a far greater chance of making a success of this vertical than the two US leaders or the numerous startups that have tried and failed to crack the UK market.

Fantasy sports should also help bet365 with user acquisition and cross-sell, as well customer engagement as players return to the app to check on their team’s performance.

Ladbrokes has tapped into this space by blending fantasy sports with accumulator betting with its 5-A-Side game launched in September 2020.

When Scout Gaming Group announced its deal with bet365 on 31 March, the supplier’s CEO, Andreas Ternström, said: “Bet365 is the world leading sports betting operator and we are extremely proud and excited to be the supplier of our full portfolio of fantasy sports and betting to them.

“This deal strengthens the view on our product portfolio with the sports betting operators.”

In June, Scout Gaming Group revealed it was axing half of its workforce to try to plug a £1.4m black hole in its finances.