10star’s Simon Trim tells Gambling Insider why Spain’s odds ahead of the Women’s FIFA World Cup Final may not be solid, as well as how the evolving sports betting market is dealing with modern trends.
It’s been nearly 60 years since anyone has been able to write an article ahead of England playing in a football World Cup Final, but after dispatching Australia in the semis, it’s now only Spain that stands between the Lionesses and a double achievement of winning both the Euro Championship and World Cup.
Given that England already have one recent major tournament victory under their belts and – according to FIFA – are ranked higher than Spain, you’d perhaps expect England to start as favourites to win the match.
However, Spain started out as tournament favourites and, according to the opening industry prices, they are still being chalked up as marginally more likely to lift the trophy come Sunday.
Relevant data points (such as expected goals, player ratings, etc), used to try and predict match outcomes by operators (or their supply chain) are scarcer for women’s football than they are for men’s.
In circumstances such as this, it’s often the case that most suppliers have no meaningful way of knowing what the ‘true’ price should be and, as a result, simply copy the prevailing market price.
Of course, it doesn’t matter if the price you display is ‘wrong,’ if you don’t have any obligation to pay it. Increasingly over the last decade and a half, the business model for most operators has been just this.
Whereas once price differentiation and knowledge were at the heart of a sports betting operation, nowadays the prices of even major operators are supplied through a handful of B2B suppliers that have no experience with proprietary pricing or running risk on their own books.
In regulated markets, online growth has come through channel shifts from retail, driven by both the advent of new products, such as in-play, and by higher margin inventions, such as same-game parlays. Often, it has been fuelled by newly regulating territories offering the potential promise of ‘easy money.’
Sports betting is often run as an acquisition funnel to casinos. As a result, there’s little thought given to pricing quality, having long since been replaced by a marketing ‘land grab’ driven by bonuses and promotions, while backed by a tendency to throw out any skilled bettors that don’t show themselves to be recreational in nature.
Rising tides lift all ships. Against the backdrop of looser regulation and cheaper costs of revenue that characterised the industry 10 years ago, there was a perception that this way of treating betting odds as ‘content,’ was sufficient to drive long-term growth.
