In part 2 of our interview with Malachy Rooney, Head of Football Strategy and Pricing, Flutter Entertainment, we continued to analyse the World Cup and the impact of the expanded tournament and hydration breaks.
He also spoke about the availability of data and how stats betting can continue to evolve, adding that ‘there’s still quite a lot of scope left to optimise the user experience within existing markets and broaden the range of competitions they’re available on’.
Sitting down with iGaming Expert ahead of SBC Summit in Lisbon, where he will be speaking on the World Cup vs Sportsbook Regulation panel, Rooney also provided insight into the use of data when it comes to the trading room.
Read part one of his interview here.
iGaming Expert: Star players took centre stage at the World Cup, did punters cash in on player props throughout the tournament?
Absolutely, particularly during the group stage period when the marquee names were scoring goals for fun. The inclusion of 48 teams was always likely to bring more heavy routs in one-sided games and unfortunately for bookmakers, a lot of the most popular star names capitalised in quick succession with consecutive matches containing marquee players scoring 2+ goals.
Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland and Harry Kane managed to score 31 goals between the four of them which also meant pre-tournament player goal milestones were largely customer-friendly too.
I won’t put numbers on it, but the challenge for a bookmaker in those spells stems largely from the correlation between match incidents. When someone like Mbappé or Haaland scores, the same goal is often paying out across the goalscorer market, shots, a raft of Bet Builder and those pre-tournament milestones all at once – and when it’s four of the most-backed names in the world doing it in quick succession, payouts and future liabilities add up very quickly.
That being said, this did dry up in the later knockout stages where staking is at its highest and the scarcity of yellow cards being awarded, following an early directive from FIFA, did mean that it was very much a case of which Player Prop market you were playing on which determined how successfully you were likely to have been.
How much have the hydration breaks had an impact on live betting and what would it mean for pricing and trading if they are implemented into the domestic season?
I still find it very diplomatic when people refer to them as hydration breaks rather than commercial ad breaks! They certainly had an impact on the field in the form of momentum swings – a 3-minute disruption for any team who are under pressure in that preceding window is a lifeline, but 104 matches is a very small sample to draw meaningful conclusions from.
From a Trading viewpoint, any break in play gives customers an opportunity to reassess their bets and a window to place a bet on something new or potentially cash out of live positions. We’re still reviewing data from customer behaviour during the tournament, but I would be surprised if they were adopted in the domestic season as standard, barring use in extreme weather conditions.
What is the next evolution of stats betting and how much have players embraced these in game props?
I think there’s still quite a lot of scope left to optimise the user experience within existing markets and broaden the range of competitions they’re available on. With improved data capture and emerging technologies, there’s no reason why customers who love to bet on, for example, English League Two or Spanish Segunda couldn’t have the same rich proposition that an English Premier League customer gets.
Bet Tracking is a good example of an ancillary feature within the Props space which has quickly grown in both importance and complexity as customers want to understand how their bet is performing in real time, which becomes increasingly challenging when you go beyond the top grade of competition – something there’s room to optimise in future.
On the flipside, the increased availability of rich data within the mass market means that even recreational customers now have very powerful AI tools at their fingertips. This enables them to become much more sophisticated in their betting behaviour as they’re more equipped to spot pricing inefficiencies and quickly compare trends or divergences across bookmakers – and that, in turn, creates its own pricing challenges for operators to manage and increases the importance of investing in optimising pricing accuracy.
How much has AI changed the way traders price football and what role does the algorithm play?
It is expediting how quickly we’re able to collate and analyse data and is also enabling modelling improvements at a faster rate than we had previously seen – this will be the same across all sports and I expect the industry to see a larger number of AI-native startups emerging in the next five years to supply pricing solutions which are built without any legacy tech burden.
But, ultimately, any algorithm is only ever as good as the data powering it and as sophisticated models become more easily accessible, operator advantages will shift from the technology itself to how well you actually understand your customers and why they behave the way they do.
So I see the tech advancements as a huge enabler here and individuals who have in-depth subject matter expertise, across Trading roles or any other function, should be well positioned to increasingly add significant value.
How challenging will pricing be at the start of the season given the World Cup and its impact on players and bigger sides?
I would say every domestic season return post-international tournament is typically more challenging as marquee players have a range of fatigue, some carrying injuries they played through in the summer, and there’s a wide spectrum of squad depletion across different clubs.
Any disruption like this makes it harder for club managers to confidently embed new transfers and ensure their teams are match fit and gelling, so I think we’ll see an amplified impact of this in the opening five gameweeks – larger price moves in the days leading up to kick off and more volatile price swings in play as teams are more likely to significantly over or underperform their expected output. So it’ll be challenging but we’re also looking forward to navigating that challenge.
Can you tell us about how important events like the SBC Summit in Lisbon are to the development of sportsbooks?
This will be my first time attending Lisbon for this year’s SBC Summit and I’m hugely looking forward to it! I’ve been really impressed by previous SBC seminars and events.
The headline keynote on Leadership in Sports Business involving Michael Jordan is a real draw for me as it speaks directly to the data and fan engagement themes I work closely on, but I’m also interested in listening to different voices regarding the differing regulatory landscapes across the globe. As an engaged customer myself, it’s always been an area of personal interest and I’m keen to hear inputs as to what the anticipated direction of travel is over the next 2-3 years.
I’m also keen to speak to others in the industry to see are they thinking the same as me – that the better the models get and the easier everyone can get their hands on them, the more the future edge will come down to how well you actually know and understand your customers.
You can read part one of his interview here.
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