Shergul Arshad, the Founder of Mondogoal, spoke at BOS alongside Lottomatica’s Ubaldo Baldi, Oulala CEO Valery Bollier and Sportito CEO Riccardo Mittiga.
Off the back of signing partnerships with Lottomatica, SISAL and more recently the Microgame Group in Italy, Arshad discussed the vast potential benefits for bookmakers to include a daily fantasy product.
He said: “It poses a particularly interesting integration for live betting, for example showing the next goalscorer odds in a match when you are picking your team.”
The Mondogoal white label games with both SISAL and Lottomatica soft launched for the Euros this summer and went live properly at the beginning of this domestic season.
The aim is to implement big prize pools in conjunction with these two, and whilst Lottomatica’s Baldi stated that it’s hard to put a value on the DFS market right now, he stated his belief that it “will become a revenue stream in its own right and not just an acquisition or conversion tool”.
With 57 million DFS players in the States, and 8.9 million of these playing regularly, the potential of this market is enormous but it’s chokablok with legality issues and costly courtroom tussles state to state. The European market may be smaller but the generation currently in its late teens is one which has grown up with fantasy, and undoubtedly a large number of these in the UK have played the Fantasy Premier League game with friends for some time.
Arshad pointed to the extended engagement times of DFS products over betting, as players carefully peruse their teams and assess team news and data. Oulala’s Valery Bollier gave a nod to the epicentre of football being in Europe, the most watched league globally and stated that “DFS can provide a solution to optimise digital strategy.”
There was definitely a buzz around this panel, which was chaired by Gemma Boore of Bates Well Braithwaite, at Betting on Sports and it seems highly likely that the UK will see its first major bookmaker DFS integration sooner rather than later.
