Pre-season problems: the challenge of rushing new products to market

It was a familiar race against time for sports betting operators. The summer months were almost over and the new domestic football season loomed on the horizon. Product department staff were working overtime to get shiny new tools up and running for the big Premier League kick-off, which was even more hotly anticipated than usual due to large swathes of the sporting calendar being curtailed due to Covid-19.

Cancelled showpieces include Euro 2020. The international football tournament is now rescheduled for 2021 and is likely to become the biggest betting event ever. While its postponement dented revenue, those tasked with keeping the front-end afloat during peak times surely breathed a sigh of relief.

You would expect operators to take full advantage of the absence of three weeks of non-stop fixtures by using the excess time efficiently to iron out technical issues and fine-tune new products for smooth sailing to the new season. But you’d have thought wrong.

Both Ladbrokes and William Hill, the two largest legacy bookmakers in the UK market, launched new sports betting products to capitalise on the return of the Premier League. Ladbrokes created a first-of-its-kind accumulator allowing Premier League punters to build and then bet on their own virtual five-a-side teams, imaginatively titled 5-a-side.

William Hill, meanwhile, launched a new Acca Freedom innovation. The product gives punters two choices on pre-match accumulator bets of five legs or more, allowing for a maximum stake of £20. Customers can select between boosted odds, or they can opt to insure their accumulator should one leg fall short. If the wager is let down by one selection, the bet will be refunded, and the customer will be issued with a free bet of up to £20.

William Hill global brand director Charlotte Emery said: “The start of any new season traditionally leaves football bettors with more questions than answers, but the one thing we are absolutely sure of is that our customers will love Acca Freedom.”

Despite much pre-season press release fanfare, there was just one problem. Ladbrokes’ 5-a-side was unavailable to punters when Fulham kicked off the 2020-21 campaign against Arsenal on Saturday, 12 September due to a technical issue, while Acca Freedom experienced accessibility issues, although William Hill confirmed there was no fault with the product.

“There is a real fear when you release a new product and put yourself through an awful lot wondering whether it’s any good or not,” says sports betting product expert Jack Sangster. Sangster, who began his career with Sporting Index before a near-five-year spell at Ladbrokes, suggests planning pre-season products should begin before Christmas to be in with a shot of being ready but, even then, timelines can be derailed as they are all dictated by the events calendar.

“It’s very easy to get side-tracked by the sports schedule, which puts massive speed bumps in the way of innovation or improving the product,” he says. “Usually you only have a small window between a summer tournament and the start of a new season.” Sangster argues the domestic season would barely be considered a “big deal” with bookmakers, despite its weekly ability to bring home the bacon. “The major tournaments just knock it over, so it stunts the creativity,” he adds.

These sentiments are echoed by Jeevan Jeyaratnam, COO at pricing specialist Abelson Odds. In his experience, something else could, and always does, crop up. “If these were rugby products, they would never see the light of day,” he says. “Football is a priority but even priorities get pushed back. Look at what happened with the football data rights award, where everyone had to stop and integrate a Betgenius feed if they didn’t have one. That would have taken precedence over any integration of a new product.”

Jeyaratnam tells EGR that third-party providers are also under pressure to provide new products, but if they aren’t ready and waiting by June, they could be confined to the scrapheap because it can take between 12 and 18 months to make it onto the integration timelines of operators. “I’m guessing there were some bugs that needed sorting and there probably still are,” he says of the Ladbrokes and Hills products that have since gone live. But where do these technical teething problems come from? Ladbrokes beta tested 5-a-side with a select group of sports bettors, so why weren’t the malfunctions rectified?

“It’s probably gone through a test cycle in an agile way with developers who may not fully understand the concept and have not been educated on it properly,” says Sangster. “They might not bet themselves and they may not even like sport.”

To iron out these issues, Sangster recommends the return of product owners, so that one person is held wholly accountable for the success or failure of a specific product. He suggests they are a dying breed in today’s global gambling industry, with many resources outsourced to cheaper locations.

The former mobile operations manager believes technical hitches are indicative of a much wider UX issue. Developers do not use their own apps and managers are not allowed to bet with their own products. He cites both teams to score (BTTS) coupons as an example. The paper slips are incredibly popular in retail but difficult to find online, where a user is expected to sift through millions of markets manually.

“Some of these things are incredibly poorly laid out,” Sangster tells EGR, half ranting by now. “If you select a leg, then go into another app to check the fixtures, the betting app will refresh and you’ll have to start all over again. This is the sort of thing that will slowly dig away at punters. They won’t email in and they won’t tweet, but they’ll slowly start looking for another experience and moving their money out.” He adds: “These products are clearly being run by people who don’t use their own app, but you don’t find many sommeliers that don’t drink wine or butchers that don’t eat meat.”

It is difficult to talk about sports betting innovation without broaching the copycat nature of the industry. If the market leader integrates something that works, pretty soon it will be emblazoned across every sportsbook front-end, licensed or otherwise. This happened with cash-out, in-play and bet builders – arguably the three most significant wagering inventions of the last decade.

“That copycat environment goes right down to the very essence of a sportsbook starting with its odds – everything is copied,” says Jeyaratnam. “Most of these European-facing sportsbooks are just copies of each other. The only way they attract people is via advertising or offers, as essentially the products are all coming from the same place.”

Both 5-a-side and Acca Freedom were accompanied by a multi-channel marketing campaign. “The sports betting market has fallen into the ultimate trap of thinking everyone must have what everyone else has,” he adds. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right, but if you haven’t got it, you lose out.”

Jeyaratnam believes operators and third-party providers are beholden to technology when it comes to innovation. He is convinced the next big breakthrough will coincide with the adoption of 5G technology. Once 5G is readily available and free of conspiracy theories, it will open up some exciting in-play concepts, including micro-markets, which have so far struggled due to streaming lag time. New York-based start-up SimpleBet attracted heavy investment for this concept. Indeed, its USP was that you can bet on the outcome of every pitch during a baseball match, for example. “That looks great on paper, but it’s been designed by people who haven’t really understood the problems inherent within watching sport streamed over the internet,” says the Abelson Odds COO.

But does sports betting really need to innovate? Sangster sits on the side of don’t fix things that aren’t broken. “Innovation is a sexy thing that people love to talk about, but no one is going to reinvent the way that people place a bet online with a basket and a betslip. Innovation would not be my concern. If somebody comes up with something as big as cash-out then great, we can copy it. But if you are not getting the simple things right, people will simply look elsewhere.”