The future of sportsbook – an alternative new reality

The last four months have taught us a great deal; from how adaptable and resilient we are as individuals and communities to what we want for a better future. One thing is clear, there is no going back to the past.

If we look to our own industry, we have all had to change the way we work, and how we operate and rapidly switch to new or flexible products to ensure commercial survival.

Clients will remember how their suppliers responded during the crisis. We took the decision to pivot our strategy in March to develop and launch alternative betting products in a matter of days so our clients could continue to serve their customers with the same, if not higher, volumes of quality sports content, despite the scarcity of live sport.

Simulated Reality was able to play out the original competition schedule of all the major football leagues, complete with live match trackers and match highlights, while we also boosted our volumes of virtual sports and esports. In the last few months, these alternative betting products have combined to create a significant increase in our available sports content compared to the same period last year.

From gap fillers to prime real estate

In tandem with the acceleration of retail to online and mobile, and alongside the growth in minority sports such as table tennis, these previously thought of ‘gap fillers’ were suddenly prime real estate for operators and brands all over the world.

Crucially, bettors’ trust and enjoyment of these products has skyrocketed in recent months – be it a simulated top-flight English football game to decide the title, a virtual tennis match played in real-time complete with in-play betting opportunities, or a FIFA 2020 tournament featuring some of the world’s best players.

From a user behaviour perspective, it has been encouraging to see customers place the same bets on alternative games of football, cricket, and tennis as they would on real events. Replicating the real sports experience was exactly what we strove for when launching these products.

Sports fans may have been starved of premium live content, but they have firmly embraced alternatives, and this trend shows no signs of fading. For instance, our bookmaker customers tell us that up to 70% of players who place bets on live German Bundesliga matches also bet on the Simulated Reality version of the same league.

Arm yourselves with alternative options

This period has shifted the goalposts for sports betting products and consumer behaviour and shown that being reliant solely on live sports or retail can put you in a vulnerable situation. The question is now that live sport is gradually coming back, how much of this change will be permanent and what do future sportsbook offerings look like?

Nothing will ever replace the thrill and excitement of live, competitive sport, and we have seen customers and sports fans come back in large numbers since the resumption of major European football. We provide an average of 400,000 live events per year to our clients, however we firmly believe alternative betting content is here to stay, both as a new betting category and as a complementary series of products to live sport.

Should live sport again face sweeping cancellations, many business owners will need to be armed with alternative scenarios. Many were not this time around.

Simulated Reality and other forms of alternative betting content, alongside enriched content such as live visuals and match trackers, have huge potential to grow into a range of new user engagement products. For example, they could soon enable sports fans to play out thousands of alternative scenarios, either side-by-side with live games or as a standalone offering.

Imagine if you could change the scenario of a crucial match and alter the course of a game by bringing on a substitute, overturning a red card, or playing out a game between the champions of 10 years ago versus the champions of today?

From so-called ‘gap filler’ content in a pre-Covid-19 world, to becoming an attractive acquisition and retention product with huge potential to drive social engagement, alternative betting content should and will almost certainly be a firm fixture in the future makeup of sportsbooks. There is no going back to the past, only looking forward to a brighter, alternative future.

Eduard Blonk joined Sportradar in March 2015 and has since headed up the company’s global sales team. He manages a commercial team of over 85 sales individuals based in more than 30 locations around the world. His team serves over 1,000 customers in over 80 countries across the betting and digital sports industry. Prior to joining Sportradar, Blonk spent 18 years in a range of global sales and marketing management roles, working within the telecommunication and data communications industry across B2B and B2C organisations in the Netherlands, Germany and US, including the likes of Siemens Mobile, Siemens Communications and Gigaset Communications. He is based in the company’s office in Las Vegas, Nevada.