Speaking at SBC Summit Lisbon, Giovanni Bertoli, Co-Founder and CEO of WSF Odds, detailed how player props are not just the future of betting in Europe, but are very much part of the present as well.
He explained that during this summer’s European Championship over 4.1% of total turnover was on player prop bets, both pre-match and live, and this figure is set to rise further.
“Real volume is there,” he told Christian Lee, Business Journalist for GamblingTV.
“It’s the evolution in other sports like basketball, where they started at 3-4% six or seven years ago and now they have reached 40% of total turnover in American sports on player props.
“So it seems that soccer has just launched now, it;s at the beginning of this curve, so we expect this number to grow a lot and perhaps reach the 40% seen in American sports.”
Instant gratification
A trend observed in many industries is the consumer’s need for instant gratification and Bertoli outlined how player props lend themselves to feeding this demand.
He said: “I’m a football fan but if you’re objective about it, it’s more boring than many other sports because goals are very rare. They are a low-frequency event, so when you allow people only to bet on a team result, which is dependent on goals, it’s very long before they see something happening.
“When you move this competition from goals to be something high-frequency, like passes, shots or shots on target, people have something to follow every second so they enjoy it more and are more engaged.
“Or maybe, as young people do today, they don’t want to watch an entire match, so they see five minutes of a match and the shots that they need to win money and then shut down or open another match. So it’s aligned with today’s tendencies.”
Competing with Instagram
Looking ahead to the future, Bertoli also stressed the need for the industry to improve its user experience and content innovation as operators are not just competing with each other but also platforms such as Instagram and TikTok that are “perfect in terms of content and user engagement”.
This presentation also includes how markets are presented so that “users can flow naturally” between pages.
“When it comes to our markets, as an example, I think they need to have a standalone page instead of being part of the normal offer because otherwise, the page of a bookmaker becomes a lot of numbers and it’s hard to follow unless you’re a professional punter,” explained Bertoli.
“What is needed is to have every page to be very clean, with just a small amount of information but presented in an extremely nice way. What we’re imagining is a page with some information about a player and the types of bets correlated to this information. So it’s a mix between informative content and a call to action to bet.
“It’s very specific to this without being mixed with thousands of other entries.”
To hear Bertoli detail the evolution of player props and what it is in store for WSF Odds in the future, click HERE to watch the full video.
