Pricing the NFL’s potential

Sport has always been at the heart of the American psyche, and with the right sportsbook offering and the right technological prowess behind it, sports betting has the capability to offer a revolutionary option that, until now, has only been available on the other side of the Atlantic.

This is none more so the case than with the NFL and the numbers make for exciting reading. As a proxy for sports betting, take fantasy sports activity. Admittedly, while this isn’t a pure comparison (some sports lend themselves to this format of betting more than others), it’s certainly a helpful pointer.

Fantasy NFL is far and away the most popular form of the game, with 8% of Americans saying that they’ve played in the last 12 months. That’s twice as many as any of the other major leagues. With a national population of close to 330 million, I’ll let you do the maths as to what the NFL’s 8% means.

As the market opens up to the millions of Americans that will now have access to legal sports betting, operators have access to all that is great about the traditional US bookmaking methods as well as adopting some of the extremely successful methods of the offshore and European books.

Mastering customer behavior will no doubt be the greatest challenge and, while we may know what’s tried and tested in Europe, the US is a veritable open range. With a huge new customer base being offered, new products such as cash-out and in-game wagering, capturing that customer data and using it to tailor a successful US-specific product is set to be a fantastic opportunity.

Customer-first approach

We’re working on this at Amelco, allowing customers to build their own bets on NFL games by combining many of the props available either for a single game or multiples. We’ve had great success in doing this with ‘soccer’-based betting and see it as a great chance to transfer it into the NFL

Take a typical game for instance; a customer can bet on New England to score first, win the match and Brady to throw 3+ touchdown passes. How a customer builds their bet is up to them, but I predict the big win on low stakes to be particularly popular.

But it doesn’t stop there. There’s some great innovations lined up for operators already, with the NFL’s Next Gen Stats set to be a key fixture.

Taking the best of European sportsbook tech (especially when it comes to lessons learned with tennis) and operators will soon be able to price a player’s ball carrying speed, yards after catch or even completed air yards. Put simply, if there are stats out there for an event, it’ll be priced.

The success of this, however, all lies in the use of data and in the US that will be a contentious point, and one that needs to be solved. The NFL’s Chris Halpin summed it up well at ICE North America earlier this year, stating that the success of in-play will hinge on the use of official data.

Its importance cannot be understated. When it comes to pricing, the NFL lends itself very well to in play betting, with accurate and timely data being the absolute key to having a successful in-play product.

However, any latency will be exploited by bettors and lead to an unprofitable product. Only the most reliable and fast data feeds will drive its success and revenues. In the UK, over 60% of the sportsbook market is now in-play and I predict the trend to extend stateside.

When it comes to the next 12 months, I can’t see NFL-based betting doing anything but going from strength to strength. The options available for bettors are set to increase significantly as more operators offer more markets more often.

[Bio] Bob Craddock is Amelco’s trading analytics manager and oversees the development of the company’s machine learning sports models as well as business intelligence and analytics. He has worked in the industry for over 15 years, having previously held roles at William Hill, Ladbrokes and Coral.