Oddschecker insights: SportNation storms golf clickshare rankings as racing favourites tumble
July officially became the lowest win-rate month for horseracing favourites as it played host to a glorious Goodwood for operators
OGM Ownership
July marked an exciting new chapter in Oddschecker Global Media’s 22-year history, as we saw the ownership of OGM and its core assets change hands, with Bruin Capital acquiring OGM from Flutter Entertainment.
The acquisition gives us an opportunity to cement ourselves as a fully independent media group for the first time in over fifteen years, while under Bruin’s stewardship we will look to not only bolster our position in existing markets but also expand into new ones.
Glorious Goodwood
On the track, Glorious Goodwood Festival saw operators largely triumph over punters. A favourite win-rate of 30.6% over the course of the festival (versus the long-term average of 36%) helped contribute to the least favourite-dominated month since we began collecting this data.
On the oddschecker grids, Sky Bet differentiated itself from the rest by offering the most place terms on average (4.3) while also remaining competitive on price (an average overround of 117% across all the races at the festival).
However, it was Betfair Sportsbook that managed to garner the most attention from oddschecker’s audience during this year’s edition, amassing 23.1% of all betslip clicks. William Hill and bet365 followed in this regard, collecting 19.4% and 17.9% of betslip clicks respectively.
GolfNation
Colin Morikawa’s bogey-free final round allowed him to claim a shock victory in The Open Championship – but on oddschecker, there was an equally surprising story emerging.
SportNation managed to achieve 14.4% of all betslip clicks when it came to this year’s edition of The Open, ranking them as the second-most clicked bookmaker for the event. For context, SportNation ranked 20th for golf clickshare as recently as April.
How did SportNation manage to storm the oddschecker golf clickshare rankings for July? A strategy around offering best-price on many of the key favourites for The Open will have certainly helped.
They offered the longest odds on Bryson Dechambeau, Rory McIlroy, Louis Oosthuizen, Shane Lowry and Colin Morikawa (the eventual winner), while offering second or third-best price on a host of other well-favoured selections.
Despite offering less generous place terms than their competitors, SportNation managed to hoover up a large volume of clicks from win-only bettors.
This acts as a useful case study of how operators can differentiate themselves in the market and shake up the top of the click rankings, attracting the attention of the oddschecker user-base along the way.
These are a few of my favourite things
The horseracing favourite win-rate in the UK and Ireland was sent tumbling in July, much to the delight of operators.
The graph below charts the three-week rolling average win-rate of the favourite horses in all UK and Ireland races since the sport returned in June 2020 following lockdown. Clearly, horse racing saw large spells of unpredictability upon its return; either bookmakers struggled to price the favourites accordingly or the favourites performed worse than expected.
A sense of normality returned from November through to April this year, with the favourites winning at a slightly greater rate than they have done historically (long-term average win-rate of 36%). However, the month of July represents the lowest favourite win-rate (32.8%) since oddschecker began collecting this data in January 2019.
In part, this may have been caused by the inclement weather that we experienced in spells throughout July – the negative correlation between the favourite win-rate and the rainfall in a month is strong. Indeed, some parts of the south east had their wettest July in over a hundred years.
