Ahead of SBC Summit 2026, Hristo Spasov, Head of Trading at Nederlandse Loterij, on how in-play sporting betting has transformed the betting experience for both users and operators alike.
From where you sit on the trading desk, what actually pushed in-play past half of all sports wagers: the data feeds, the product, or a change in bettor behaviour?
HS: I don’t think there was a single factor that pushed in-play betting. It was really the combination — and, importantly, the sequence — of three things: data, product innovation, and change in bettor behaviour.
Data feeds were the pivotal enabler. The availability of fast, reliable and increasingly granular real-time data made it possible for operators to price and trade a vast number of sporting events simultaneously across different sports, leagues and countries. Without that infrastructure, in-play simply could not have scaled to the level we see today. It gave trading teams the ability to continuously expand the number of matches and competitions offered live.
Once that data infrastructure was in place, the product evolved around it. Operators created markets around virtually every stage and twist of a sporting event — team and player performance, next-match-action markets, increasingly granular event-based markets around shots, passes, tackles, aces, corners and many other statistics.
Features such as cash-out, live visualisations and streaming directly within the betting platform transformed the overall experience. The sportsbook was no longer just somewhere you placed a bet before the game and returned to afterwards to see the result. It became a product that customers could actively engage with throughout the entire event.
That, in turn, changed the bettor’s behaviour. Customers became accustomed to making decisions in real time, taking opinion on what they were seeing in the match rather than placing one pre-match bet and passively watching it develop. They could continually form a view on what might happen next and act on it.
I think that behavioural change is particularly important. The enormous increase in the granularity of markets gave bettors many more opportunities to express an opinion. You were no longer simply predicting who will win the match. You could predict what happens next, how a particular player performs, that creates a much more continuous and personally involving betting experience.
Walk us through the seconds after a goal goes in. Where does latency sit in that chain, and where has Nederlandse Loterij managed to strip it out?
HS: A goal is the single most important event in a football match from an in-play trading perspective. Not only because it changes the score, but it immediately changes every related outcome and triggers a whole chain of actions across the sportsbook.
The first priority is to suspend the relevant betting markets. You do not want to continue accepting bets at outdated probabilities. The live match information then needs to be updated, the new game state processed, and the odds recalculated across all affected markets.
That means repricing a large number of markets simultaneously — match results, total goals and many others. New markets will be created because of the goal like next goalscorer, team to score next, player markets, etc.
Bets that have already been decided can be resolved and settled as quickly as possible. That is also an important part of the customer experience: if a customer has just won a bet, we want that result reflected quickly and the winnings available to them.
This is where latency becomes absolutely critical: The time between the goal happening in the stadium and the event being captured by the data provider; the time required for that information to reach our platform; the time our systems need to process the new state and update the prices; and finally, the time required to publish those changes to the customer.
Every millisecond you can save from that chain has value from two perspectives: customer experience and trading risk. From the customer’s perspective, the ambition is to feel as close to the stadium as possible.
From a trading perspective, those seconds are even more critical. If there is too much latency between something happening on the pitch and the market being suspended you create a window in which people with faster information could potentially place a bet knowing the outcome. Closing that information gap is therefore fundamental to effective in-play risk management.
At Nederlandse Loterij, an important part of reducing that latency is the quality and proximity of the underlying sports data. We work with official data providers and in-venue feeds, which means the information originates as close as possible to the actual sporting event rather than relying on delayed television pictures or secondary sources.
But it is not only about how quickly the goal reaches us. The whole chain matters: detect, suspend, process, reprice, publish and settle. The objective is to remove unnecessary delays at every stage so that we can reopen markets as quickly and safely as possible.
How much of your live pricing today is genuinely model-led rather than trader judgement, and where do you refuse to take the human out of the loop?
HS: The reality of modern sports trading is that well over 95% of our betting markets are now model-driven. Given the enormous expansion in event coverage and the sheer volume and granularity of markets we offer, there is simply no other way to operate at that scale.
A single football match can have hundreds of markets moving simultaneously, while at any given moment we may be trading a very large number of events across multiple sports and competitions. Models therefore provide the foundation: they process live data, continuously recalculate probabilities
And those models are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The quality of the data, the modelling techniques and the automation around execution have all improved significantly. The value of good trader judgement becomes more concentrated in the areas where it can genuinely make a difference.
For me, that is where I would not want to take the human completely out of the loop.
A model is extremely good at processing information consistently and at scale, but a trader brings context, local knowledge and an understanding of local customer behaviour that is much harder to replicate. Our traders understand the sports and competitions that matter to our Dutch customers. They know the teams, players and local narratives, they also understand from experience how our customers actually bet on those events.
That knowledge allows them to challenge or adjust the model, also to identify opportunities, they can create local specials, bespoke markets and propositions around events or narratives that they know will resonate with our customers — opportunities that a standardised model may never identify on its own.
So I see it less as models versus traders and more as a division of strengths. Models give us scale, speed and consistency; traders provide judgement, context and creativity, identifying exceptions and using expertise where it creates the greatest competitive advantage.
When operators talk about turning live data into deeper engagement, which live products or micro-markets are actually delivering that for TOTO, whether on time spent, bet frequency or anything else you measure?
HS: For us, player proposition markets have indisputably been the biggest game changer in terms of deeper engagement.
What we have seen — and this goes well beyond the Netherlands — is a significant shift in the way fans engage with sport. Traditionally, betting was predominantly centred around the team and the final result: who wins, how many goals are scored, and so on. Increasingly, however, customers are now following and betting on individual players and their performances.
The recent World Cup was a very strong benchmark for us in that respect. Player-related markets such as shots, shots on target and other individual performance metrics became a major component of Bet Builder activity, to the point where they were competing for attention with traditional core markets such as 1X2 and over/under goals.
That tells us something quite important about how sports engagement itself is changing. Fans increasingly follow individual players across teams, leagues and even countries. A customer may have a strong view on Mbappé, Lamine Yamal, Gakpo or Messi regardless of which team they are playing for. That creates an additional layer of engagement alongside traditional team loyalty.
From an in-play perspective, that is particularly powerful because player performance naturally generates a continuous stream of moments to engage with throughout the match. A customer is no longer only interested in the final result. Every attacking sequence, shot, pass or individual action can potentially become relevant to the position they have taken.
So, if I had to identify the area that has delivered the clearest change for us, it would be player-related markets combined with Bet Builder. They have broadened the betting experience beyond simply predicting the outcome of the match and given customers many more reasons to remain engaged with the action as it develops.
You trade in one of Europe’s most tightly regulated markets. Do duty-of-care obligations and advertising limits in the Netherlands change how far you can push live betting compared with operators elsewhere?
HS: The Netherlands is one of the most tightly regulated gambling markets in Europe, and the rules around in-play betting, advertising and duty of care inevitably shape how operators develop and present their products.
But I don’t necessarily see that as a limitation. Those are the rules of the market, they apply to everyone operating in the Netherlands, and ultimately they are there to ensure that customers can participate in a safe and responsible environment. Our responsibility is to build the best possible product within that framework.
You cannot simply pursue engagement at any cost or assume that every product used internationally is automatically appropriate for the Dutch market. When we consider new in-play products, customer engagement has to sit alongside responsible gambling and our duty-of-care obligations.
For us, that puts even greater emphasis on the quality of the underlying product: the breadth and relevance of our markets, the quality and speed of the live experience, the usability of the site, and the variety of betting opportunities we can offer within the regulatory framework.
It also reinforces the importance of understanding the local customer. Rather than trying to replicate what an operator might be doing in another jurisdiction, we focus on creating an experience that is relevant to Dutch sports fans and reflects the way they want to engage with their favourite sports, teams and players.
Ultimately, regulation defines the playing field; it doesn’t remove the opportunity to innovate. It challenges us to innovate in the right areas. For TOTO, the objective is therefore not to push live betting as far as technically possible, but to make the experience as relevant, high-quality and engaging as possible while maintaining the safe environment our customers and the regulator expect.
Has the make-up of the trading team changed, with quants and data engineers arriving where odds compilers used to sit? And what skills will you need in two years that you lack now?
HS: Absolutely. Quants and data engineers have already become the backbone of modern trading operations, and that transition has been happening for some time.
The traditional role of the odds compiler — manually creating and continuously adjusting prices — has been absorbed by models and automation. With the number of events and markets we trade today, and the amount of data behind every price, it simply wouldn’t be possible to operate at the required scale in the traditional way.
As a result, a lot of the work around pricing, model development, model performance and optimisation has naturally moved towards quants, data scientists and engineers. Their role will only become more important as the underlying complexity of sports increases.
Football is a good example. Changes such as VAR, longer and less predictable added time, match interruptions and evolving playing patterns all have an impact on probabilities. Models need to understand those dynamics and adjust continuously. When you multiply that across thousands of events, hundreds of markets and many different sports, the sophistication required from both the models and the people building them becomes significant.
Still the trader’s role is evolving rather than disappearing. Traders increasingly need to understand models, interpret data, identify where automation is not behaving as expected and, importantly, understand the customer.
And that brings me to the skill I think we will need much more of over the next two years: bringing customer behavioural intelligence much closer to trading decision-making.
Historically, trading models have been exceptionally good at answering the question: What is the probability of this sporting outcome? I think the next generation of trading needs to become much better at answering another question: How are customers going to interact with this event and with our product?
There is an old trading principle I still believe is extremely relevant: trade the customer, not just the event.
That means combining traditional sports modelling with a much deeper understanding of customer behaviour — what customers want to bet on, how they construct their bets, which players and narratives drive engagement, how behaviour changes during a match and where demand is likely to emerge next.
I still think that dimension is underdeveloped across the industry. We have invested enormously in becoming better at modelling the sporting event; the next competitive advantage will come from combining that capability with a much richer understanding of the customer.
What conversation about live data or in-play betting do you most want the industry to have at SBC Summit that it hasn’t had properly yet?
HS: I think there are two conversations I would particularly like to hear:
The first is about what the next generation of live sports data actually looks like. We have made enormous progress in the speed and granularity of data collection, but I think there is still a lot of untapped potential. I would be very interested to hear how data providers see new collection technologies developing, what new data points will become available, and — most importantly from an operator and trading perspective — how those data points can translate into genuinely new and engaging betting opportunities.
It is not simply about collecting more data. The challenge is to convert that data into a new generation of in-play products: more player-level markets, more event-driven markets and potentially entirely new ways for customers to interact with a sporting event in real time.
The second conversation, and perhaps the more difficult one, is around access to that data and the economics of the sports-data:
There has been significant concentration in sports-data distribution, and I think the industry should have a very open discussion about what that means for operators over the long term. High-quality official data is essential to running a competitive in-play sportsbook, so questions around availability, competition and affordability are becoming increasingly important.
I would therefore also like to hear more from alternative and emerging data providers. How do we encourage innovation and competition while maintaining the speed, accuracy and integrity that operators require.
Held in Lisbon from 29 September to 1 October 2026, SBC Summit is one of the world’s largest gatherings of betting and gaming professionals.
The event will bring together 40,000 attendees from across the industry for three days of learning, networking, and discussion, alongside a major exhibition featuring leading brands from around the globe.
For more information and tickets, visit sbcevents.com/sbc-summit.
