With one of the biggest days in US sports just around the corner, it might be difficult to predict whether the Rams or the Bengals will win Super Bowl LVI at the spectacular SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, but the one certainty is that the nation’s sports betting businesses will be celebrating as loudly as anyone.
2022 is poised to biggest the most successful year to date for the sector, mainly due to the fact that the 56th Super Bowl is the first to take place since mobile sports betting was legalised in the state of New York.
New York is the fourth most populated state in the US, the largest so far to legalise betting on sports and has a demographic that leans heavily towards enthusiastic sports fandom.
However, Thomas Allen, analyst at Morgan Stanley, believes that this ‘new’ market is likely to be dominated by the biggest beasts, and that only a few of the largest companies will dominate once the market settles into a regular rhythm, stating sports betting in New York “reminds us that the US sports betting/iGaming market is likely to be very large, with only a handful of market share winners. Scale matters and to date, it appears that only FanDuel, DraftKings and BetMGM have been able to consistently gain outsized market share.”
Earlier this month, research company Macquarie reported that this month that the eight further states of Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas, Vermont, Massachusetts, Missouri, Maine and Wisconsin may all legalise sports betting during 2022, with California, Florida, Georgia and Kentucky to follow in 2023. This would result in 60% of the US population having access to legalised sports betting in 2022, rising to 83% in 2023.”