It’s already 1½ months when I last time wrote my blog. I should be more active but there have been so many other things to do…

I participated in World Gaming Executive Summit few weeks ago in Barcelona. That was good event where I got some ideas for my blog. I had excellent panel discussion about the future of lotteries with CEO of Lottoland and I’ll write about that after my summer vacation but now I’ll concentrate on Sports Betting – again.

Sergey Portnov, CEO of Parimatch, gave interesting predictions about the future of Sports Betting. I’ll summarize what Sergey told and make my own predictions too. Let’s see how well we could see the future of Sports Betting.

Portnov presented 10 points and gave odds all of them. Here is short version about his predictions without those odds:

• there will be 100+ new betting sites targeting 18 – 25 years old segment
• marketing massacre is imminent, budgets doubling and LTV also growing
• bookmakers will run their own sports competitions to ensure always on live betting propositions
• majority of companies will transform management teams
• ICE event will be overfilled with payments solutions, bookmakers will finally start building USPs around payments
• sport streaming in its current form will become obsolete
• individual product offerings will overtake generic offerings
• all major players in the market will rebrand
• offshore market will grow faster than regulates market
• esports will account for 10 % revenue for betting operators

It’s very logic that I look Sports Betting from different perspective than Sergey does. Finland versus Ukraine/Cyprus and state-owned monopoly versus private owned offshore company are totally different worlds. Anyhow we both know Sports Betting business well and that’s why I could agree with Sergey about many of his points.

My 10 predictions about the future (5 years) of Sports Betting are:

• GAFA companies will enter to gambling/Sports Betting business
• big media companies will utilize their sports media rights also in Sports Betting business
• companies will have separate Sports Betting brands & offering for active customers and average customers
• individual products & services will increase their popularity
• esports will be the second biggest sport in Sports Betting (includes new esports formats)
• marketing of Sports Betting will be banned – at least in EU
• bonuses won’t be allowed
• regulated companies will have at least 80 % market share in Europe and North America
• there will be new popular Sports Betting products which are different ones compared to current fixed odds Sports Betting
• the importance of responsible gaming will increase dramatically