In this roundtable, industry experts from Intelitics, Neosurf and BETER discuss whether North America is truly ready for the World Cup betting boom and many operators may still be underprepared for what’s coming.
Allan Stone, founder & CEO, Intelitics
Sue Page, CEO Americas at Neosurf
George Arabatlian, head of Commercial Partnerships at BETER
NEXT: The World Cup will be the biggest test for the North American market to date. From your perspective, is the market ready for it? And what are going to be its biggest challenges?
Allan Stone: No. The North American market isn’t ready, and most operators haven’t admitted that to themselves yet.
Every piece of product, promo and CRM infrastructure in this region was built for NFL, NBA and MLB bettors. Same-game parlays tuned for a 60-minute game with timeouts every four minutes. Trading desks staffed around a North American calendar. A new player cohort trained on American sports archetypes. A World Cup doesn’t fit that shape. Ninety-minute matches, fewer betting windows, a casual audience that cares about the result, not the prop.
The biggest challenge isn’t scale. Operators can handle volume. We saw that in 2018 post-PASPA and again in 2015 during DFS peak. The challenge is specificity. This tournament will put a completely different bettor in front of them: someone who showed up for the country, not the book.
The other challenge is attention share. Every Fortune 100 advertiser will be buying World Cup inventory this summer. Operators aren’t just competing against each other for a betting audience. They’re competing against Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, and every consumer brand on earth for the same eyeballs and the same share of the consumer’s entertainment budget. If your product, creative and media buying aren’t world-class against that field, you lose before the whistle.
Sue Page: North America is more ready now than it was four years ago, with broader state coverage, more mature operators, and growing familiarity with digital wallets and alternative payments. That readiness, however, varies by country, with each nation being at a different stage of regulatory evolution. Broadly speaking, the real test will be one of execution under pressure. Operators must prepare to handle a surge of first-time and low-frequency bettors without breaking payments, KYC, withdrawals, or support. One failed deposit or delayed payout will lose a customer instantly, which is why wallets become critical for reliability and retention. At the same time, the World Cup doesn’t sit in isolation. It competes with live betting across MLB, WNBA, and CFL, so they’re fighting for attention, wallet share, and ongoing engagement, not just acquisition.
George Arabatlian: The infrastructure is ready. Legal sports betting is live in most US states, the major operators have mature platforms, and Canada and Mexico bring established verticals of their own.
Content is where the real test lies. The staggered match calendar will leave significant gaps between kick-offs, and if a first-time bettor signs up for a group-stage match and finds nothing relevant for the next eighteen hours, you’ve already lost them. This is exactly where 24/7 fast-paced content, which BETER provides, helps sportsbooks retain and engage their bettors.
Sustaining that engagement across a six-week window demands a content mix built for a football-first audience. Operators that are only planning for the match windows themselves, rather than the space around them, will see that gap expose itself very quickly!
NEXT: The US, Canada, and Mexico all have distinct regulatory environments and bettor profiles. Which of these markets do you think has the most to gain from the tournament?
AS: Canada. Specifically, Ontario.
The US is too fragmented to get the uplift people think it will. State-by-state licensing, uneven promotional rules, different product availability in every jurisdiction. A casual fan in Texas can’t legally engage with the same product a casual fan in New Jersey can. That structural drag eats most of the World Cup tailwind.
Ontario is a mature, fully regulated, single-market environment. It’s where operators can run a national-feel campaign, centralise CRM, and show up against a soccer-literate audience that’s been starved of a marquee event on home soil. The Canadian market is less saturated than the US, the products are more consistent, and the bettor population hasn’t been taxed with seven years of carpet-bomb TV spend.
Mexico has the audience. Football is the national religion. But the regulated side of the market doesn’t have the product depth to absorb the volume. Most of that interest will go grey or offshore, and the legal operators will watch it happen.
One caveat runs through all of this. The upside in any market is conditional on home team performance. If the US actually shows up and plays deep into the tournament, and to a lesser extent if Canada or Mexico make a run, interest amplifies, casual discovery amplifies, and the commercial window widens significantly. If the home teams exit in the group stage, the discovery opportunity halves. Operators can’t control that, but they need to plan for both outcomes.
SP: If the question is immediate football engagement, Mexico has the most to gain. Football is more culturally embedded there, cash remains highly relevant in everyday payments, and the national emotional connection to the tournament is far deeper than in the US. If, on the other hand, the question is one of structural upside, the US has the most to gain. Soccer is growing there, interest in MLS is increasing, and both US national teams rank very highly in US soccer popularity surveys. But US soccer attention is still more event driven than it is in Mexico, where it’s baked into the culture. So while the World Cup could act as an accelerant for US football sports betting culture, in general, that interest might not necessarily translate into year-round football betting behavior.
GA: The US has the most to gain in absolute terms, simply because of its sheer market size and the fact it’s still forming its football betting habits. A well-executed tournament could genuinely shift long-term engagement with the sport, and no other market is competing for that prize.
That said, Mexico is the best positioned market in terms of conversion. Football already sits at the centre of sport culture in the country, and this tournament will only amplify existing behaviours instead of having to build them from the ground up. Canada is sitting somewhere in between, with Ontario’s mature regulated
framework differing from more fragmented regulations in other provinces – it doesn’t yet feel as unified.
NEXT: The tournament will bring a huge volume of first-time and infrequent bettors to operators. What does the industry need to do to convert this casual audience into a more long-lasting one?
AS: Stop treating them all the same. That’s the whole job.
Every new registration gets the same welcome flow, the same $1,500 first-bet promo, the same push notification three days after their last bet. That works if every customer is the same. They aren’t. A first-time World Cup bettor is not a DFS-to-sportsbook converter. They showed up because their country is playing, not because they want to be a seven-figure handle customer.
Operators need to identify the archetype fast. Promo hunter. Social bettor. Entertainment-led casual. Potential high-velocity. You can get that signal on the first bet, not the tenth. Then you build the next 30 days around who that player actually is, not the template your CRM tool ships with.
The mistake everyone will make: optimising to FTD. FTD is vanity. Second deposit is the real metric. Third deposit tells you whether the product held their attention past the tournament.
If the industry treats this cohort like the top of a volume funnel, it’ll lose 90% of them by August. If it treats them like individuals, it keeps enough to change the long-term shape of the North American market.
SP: Retention comes from habit, not acquisition. Casual bettors will stay when the experience is simple, fast, and gives them control. That means providing consistently reliable deposits, fast payouts and clear visibility, rather than just another attractive-looking welcome promo. Daily Fantasy Sports have already trained millions to engage at a player and stats level, so operators should be looking at how they convert that into simple, transparent football betting. From a Neosurf perspective, wallets anchor this by making money movement predictable, improving success rates, and giving users a single place to track and manage their spend across all operators, which will be vital once the World Cup ends and attention shifts back to other sports.
GA: This is the major question the whole industry should be focused on. The 2022 data is unforgiving – US participation more than doubled the last time around, and then fell off a cliff as those bettors returned to NFL and NBA. The World Cup was treated as a lightning-in-a-bottle moment instead of a whole season.
Converting casual bettors is a product challenge, not a marketing one. Our own data from the 2024 Euros makes that point clear – daily ESportsBattle’s eFootball bet volumes stayed 39% above pre-tournament levels for weeks after the final whistle, because we gave football fans a continuous football experience rather than asking them to context-switch back to other sports.
Operators who aren’t planning for that bridge will spend a fortune acquiring bettors and watch most of them churn in July.
NEXT: There is still a lot of scepticism across North America towards iGaming and sports betting. What does the industry need to do during the tournament to help change that perception? And what mistakes must it avoid?
AS: Most of the scepticism is earned, not imagined. Treat it as an efficiency problem, not a PR problem.
Scepticism in North America is driven by one thing. People seeing betting ads they shouldn’t be seeing. A recovering problem gambler watching an NFL game and getting served five sportsbook spots in one quarter. A 16-year-old retargeted on TikTok. When the ads are intrusive, they get called intrusive. When the ads land on the right audience, nobody complains.
The World Cup will triple the inventory operators buy and double the people watching. The temptation will be to blanket everything. That’s the mistake. The operators who get precise with targeting, frequency caps and creative will get less heat and more lift. The ones who carpet-bomb will hand ammunition to every regulator already writing the next set of restrictions.
The second mistake is recycling American sportsbook playbooks for a global event. A $1,500 first-bet promo at a World Cup match reads cynical to a casual soccer audience, because it is. Smaller, smarter offers land better. Deposit $10, bet $25. Those signal respect instead of aggression. Jackpocket’s age-check pattern, turning a compliance moment into a brand moment, is the template. Use it.
SP: From Neosurf’s perspective, this comes down to trust, player protections, and providing non-negotiable clarity around deposits and payouts. Whenever a tournament like the World Cup comes around, there’s a tendency among operators to go big on promotional offers, but this can fuel scepticism further if players feel they’re being commodified in the pursuit of acquisitions. In order to change this perception, operators should instead focus on providing experiences that give players more control and put their long-term interests front and centre. In real terms, this means ensuring they have greater transparency over their spending behaviour and giving them access to adequate responsible gaming safeguards for instances where intervention is required.
GA: The World Cup will be the most visible moment the North American industry has ever had, and every decision during those six weeks will be scrutinised. The fastest way to reinforce that skepticism is through aggressive bonus marketing and treating the tournament as a cash grab.
Integrity, transparency and responsible gambling have to be the default. BETER is ESIC Gold Standard accredited and Partners with IBIA, while every match in our fast-betting portfolio, which includes ESportsBattle and Setka Cup table tennis content, is monitored by our in-house integrity team.
That’s what makes Tier 1 operators comfortable offering our content in regulated US states. Suppliers and operators who treat integrity as table stakes will define how this industry is perceived once the tournament is over.
