The summer of 2024 offers the sports betting industry the first real festival of sport for over five years. Following the Covid pandemic and the rescheduled 2020 sporting calendar, 2021 offered a reduced capacity summer of sport while the FIFA World Cup took place in the winter of 2022. 

But now, the UEFA European Championships, the CONMEBOL Copa America and the 2024 Summer Olympics will all take place in the same summer. This is bound to create a betting bonanza for operators.

To discuss this and more, SBC Media caught up with Ivan Rozic, Head of Sales, OddsMatrix at EveryMatrix. Rozic noted that having the three tournaments occur this summer is an incredibly exciting proposition. 

He explained: “I think what’s crucial for every operator out there is that these kinds of competitions globally that attract so much attention is the acquisition side of it. Everybody is looking to provide as much as they can in order to attract new players coming into their businesses and actually keep them there for a longer period of time. 

“So how we’re preparing from our side is that we believe we have the technology to cater to that precise focus, in order to attract the players, but not only to be there for a month, while the competitions are out there. We’re there to actually engage those players throughout the competitions and actually convince them to stay.”

While the European Championships, set to take place in Germany this summer, will provide OddsMatrix with an opportunity in its home markets, the Copa America offers the chance for the company to assert its presence in the markets in which it is emerging. 

The firm is intent on growing its presence in North and Latin America and the opportunity to cater to LatAm based football fans is something that Rozic believes can help it in this mission. 

But where EveryMatrix is seeking to set itself apart is by embarking on a hyper-localised strategy.

“How we envision it is that we’re bringing a suitcase full of features that have not been there in Latin America,” Rozic outlined. “For most of the operators, you’ve got your big B2Cs that are there already but what we’re trying to do is to empower the local, highly-focused operators that are focusing with local expertise with local people that are looking for solutions to their problems, whether it’s bonusing campaigns that they can set up or whether it’s the coverage that they can offer to their players and the stability of the offering. 

“We believe that we come with a toolkit that they can utilise and actually grab market share from the big guys out there.”

Rozic explained that one of the key differentiators for the OddsMatrix platform is its uptime statistics, which displays that it outperforms its competitors for the ability for players to use the platform. 

And as a huge summer of sport is set to attract a new type of player, it is imperative that sportsbook platforms can deal with the high volume of traffic that will inevitably be on the way. 

Rozic explained: “You have to be able to cope with settlement during these peak moments because it’s gonna be a pretty wild summer. A lot of the things are going to happen across all three of those three competitions, more or less at the same time and we need to be able to maintain the stability there and maintain the settlement speed. 

“I think when it comes to settlement speed, I think it’s often underestimated because players today want instant gratification. If their ticket is a winning ticket, they want to have that money balanced instantly. It doesn’t matter what sport it is, it doesn’t matter what they like to do, fencing or water polo or football or esports, they want that instant gratification.”