Star power: How player props are redefining the football betting experience

With 65 million followers on Instagram, Liverpool talisman Mohamed Salah has around 18 million more fans on the social media platform than the newly crowned Premier League champions themselves.

Such star power is not an anomaly in football – and while few would dispute the old adage that “no one is bigger than the club”, the beautiful game’s biggest names often have a reach that is comparable to or even surpasses the clubs they represent.

Social media has supercharged such individual mega-brands by bringing fans closer to the personalities behind the goals, tackles, passes and saves. Owing to this, football enthusiasts are more in tune with their heroes than ever before – and are more interested in betting on their individual displays.

Star power

Wagering on athletes is, of course, not a new phenomenon. In sports like golf, boxing or tennis, in-play betting markets have always been associated with individual performances.

However, individual performances are being placed under the spotlight like never before in team sports. For example, both male and female NBA fans told a YouGov survey that the top reason for their interest in the North American basketball league was not the iconic teams, but the players.

This type of fandom is helping to drive a greater interest in wagering on individuals in team sports. Research by Deloitte of Generation Z sports fans found that nearly one in five of those aged 21 years or older had used a sports betting app due to following a professional athlete online.

As a result of these trends, there has been an acceleration in the growth of player props in recent years – particularly in North America, where the traditional major league sports of NFL American football, NBA basketball, NHL ice hockey and Major League Baseball continue to grow. As the world’s most popular sport, though, football’s reach through player props is potentially without parallel in the evolving sports betting landscape.

Shifting the focus

Rome-based WSF Odds launched three years ago to tap into this specific opportunity of football live betting by providing sportsbooks with live odds, driven by artificial intelligence, with the stated aim of shifting the focus of sports betting from team results to individual performances.

“Our vision is to turn every individual action in a game into a betting market,” said Giovanni Bertoli, chief executive officer and co-founder at WSF Odds. “We are able to calculate the probability and odds of any action that can be measured objectively – such as passes, fouls, shots and more – so that every minute of the match can be interesting for people who are watching and betting on it.”

As the late, great football manager Brian Clough once said: “It only takes a second to score a goal.”

However, such strikes are rare. In the recently completed Premier League season, there was an average of 2.93 goals per game – less than half the number of goals in an NHL game. Given the growth of football betting in-play, punters need more than one goal roughly every half an hour to satisfy their wagering appetites.

Diverse markets

With this in mind, WSF Odds supports a diverse range of props on a pre-match and live betting basis – although Bertoli acknowledged that in-play bets have been the enterprise’s primary focus since launching.

As the WSF Odds CEO explained in a video interview with iGamingBusiness.com earlier this year, the company strives to provide markets that cover every single statistic that is associated with an individual player’s performance – from completed passes to the foot with which a goal was scored.

“A goal is a low-frequency event, and these are long matches,” Bertoli said. “However, by moving to props, which are high-frequency events, every minute of a game becomes meaningful. If you are betting on a prop, you will watch every single piece of action with a higher level of attention.”

WSF Odds updates its prop markets on a quarterly basis after taking into consideration specific requests from clients. For instance, the offering was updated recently to give punters the chance to keep a bet alive if a player is taken off the pitch by automatically transferring the wager to the substitute.

“We already cover a lot of actions and I think we are reaching the point where you will be able to bet on literally every action in a game,” Bertoli said.

Built around the props

WSF Odds was established as a joint venture between sports technology start-up Wall Street Football and sportsbook trading service Tradinglab.

WSF algorithms are the basis to determine fixed-odds player, team or match over/under wagers, while a customisable trader dashboard empowers operators to tailor their offering.

“What sets us apart is the fact that we were born to specialise in this niche, and we have built everything around the props,” Bertoli added. “We have built a very user-friendly dashboard that allows our clients’ traders to customise the margins and personalise the offering however they want.

“We have invested a lot into algorithms based on artificial intelligence, but we still also work with expert traders, because we believe in their knowledge, know-how and ability to understand ‘sharp punters’. It is important both to intervene manually when needed, but also to train the algorithms to learn the way they think.”

The live football data is captured by Opta and the sports data provider’s parent company, Stats Perform, both of which are designated as WSF Odds pricing partners.

The data is processed within milliseconds and probabilities are calculated within the blink of an eye from across the footballing world, with WSF Odds covering dozens of competitions across more than 30 countries in Europe and the Americas.

Primary drivers

Indeed, Bertoli is confident that player props will continue to grow outside North America, where such markets have been increasingly popular in recent years.

“Prop bets originated from American sports, but in football they only arrived recently,” said Bertoli, who added that the increasing prominence of real-time performance data and game statistics in football coverage and conversations will accelerate change.

“It’s growing a lot, and there are more data points on player performances that give us the opportunity to build new bet types, which is something we are looking into.”

According to Bertoli, the key is to ensure a sound user journey which, he believes, is lacking in many other parts of the sector.

“Online sportsbooks are competing with other entertainment platforms, but they are much less well-designed in terms of the user experience,” he said. “For example, if you want to find a particular bet, you often have to search through a long list of events.

“Going forward, I think a good, AI-powered user interface will be increasingly important to provide customers with personalised content, ensuring a smooth experience for the end user.”

Global and local development

While it will doubtlessly remain committed to its football roots through Wall Street Football, WSF Odds also envisages future bet-in-play opportunities through an outlook that is simultaneously global and local.

“Now that our football product is mature, we will also start building for other sports, like tennis,” Bertoli said.

“That will be our next step, probably towards the end of the year, but it depends on the availability of good live data so odds and bets can be modified and settled effectively.

“We are also developing our algorithms so they and our traders can be as local as possible, and therefore perform well in smaller countries with particular types of bettors and competitions.”

Just as the market appears to be gradually shifting from team to individual bets, the focus for WSF Odds in the coming months will be to link up with the right type of partners.

“We are reaching a point where our football product is stable in terms of margin and performance, so this year is about distributing it to more clients,” Bertoli said. “We don’t just go for as many clients as possible though; we tend to pick the market leaders.”