For some, this is the World Cup of surprises: the Cape Verde fairytale, the nine out of ten African teams qualifying for the round of 32 (even though only two of them actually advanced to the round of 16), Germany eliminated by Paraguay and defeated by Ecuador. But in reality, Looking at it from the betting agencies' side, this is the most "obvious" World Cup possible., where practically all the big teams are progressing and, above all, the most anticipated strikers are scoring in droves: Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi, Erving Haaland, Harry Kane, and even Vinicius Jr. and Dembele. And when the most predictable things happen, it's the bookmakers who lose out, as casual gamblers tend to back the big scorers, while betting companies generally make more money when star players disappoint.
An article in the Financial Times explains what is happening in this World Cup, citing a study by Bank of America according to which the American betting company DraftKings, one of the largest online betting brands in the world, would have lost up to 50 million dollars (about 43 million euros) only during the tournament's group stage. The first reason is that agencies have invested heavily in this World Cup, spending hundreds of millions on promotions to attract potential bettors.
The second reason concerns the strongest attackers in the world, who in this tournament are doing everything except not answering the present: Messi 7 goals, Mbappé 7, Haaland and Kane 5, Dembelé, Vinicius Jr and Oyarzabal 4. Multiple bets, known as accumulators in the UK and parlays in the US, have been the main causes of bookmakers' losses and bettors' rewards. These bets proved particularly damaging when Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, and Kylian Mbappé each scored a brace last week.
Parlays in fact offer very high winnings if the bettor guesses a series of predictions correctly, and for this reason they are normally extremely profitable for betting companies, since it is unlikely that all the conditions of the game will occur simultaneouslyAccording to Bank of America, one of the most popular bets was to bet that all three star players would score: those who predicted that all three would score at least twice—an event with an estimated probability of about 1%—as indeed happened, therefore obtained particularly high winnings.
Another issue: casual bettors tend to bet on their own national team. According to Julie Hoover, an analyst at Bank of America, the excellent performance of the US national team has so far been "the biggest risk exposure" for most bookmakers in the US, while England's 4-2 victory over Croatia, which attracted the highest betting volume in the group stage, cost Flutter, DraftKings' main competitor and owner of brands such as Paddy Power, Sky Bet and FanDuel, dearly.
Flutter UK customers won €4,1 million thanks to that match, but the company said the subsequent 0-0 draw between England and Ghana "more than offset the losses." In any case, according to Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon, quoted by the Financial Times, the tournament likely won't be "a driver of revenue growth in the short term," but companies could still benefit from the increased brand awareness and cross-sell higher-margin products, such as online casinos.
