The Top 4 Gambling Industry Stories To Watch This NFL Season

Thursday night, at 7:20 local time in Kansas City, a new NFL season kicks off.

So if you’re still planning to enter best ball drafts, you’d better hurry the heck up.

The NFL is the biggest game in town, and it just keeps getting bigger. That’s true of the league and its unrelenting penetration into mainstream American culture, and it’s true of its place in the betting world. According to the American Gaming Association, after an estimated $26.7 billion was wagered legally on the NFL last season, that number is projected to grow to $35 billion this year. That would be a 31% year-over-year increase.

Other numbers of note from the AGA: Surveys suggest 90% of sports bettors feel it’s important to them that they bet with legal, regulated sportsbooks, and 75% of American adults support having regulated sports betting in their state, up slightly from a 73% figure the year before.

Of course, there is also plenty of illegal betting going on, but that’s not the focus of this article. Just ahead of a new season beginning when the defending champion Chiefs engage in an AFC title game rematch with the Ravens, we figured we’d break down the four biggest regulated (or at least regulated-adjacent) gambling industry stories worth tracking between now and Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans.

1. ESPN Bet on the hot seat

We’ve all heard sports podcasters or radio hosts talk about the odds on who will be the “first coach fired” every NFL season — a market, by the way, that no regulated book offers, so the odds they’re using are always from offshores. Anyway, the idea is to identify which coaches are coming into the season on thin ice and are in danger of losing their jobs if they get off to a rocky start.

Well, ESPN Bet probably isn’t quite in danger of getting yanked out of the App Store by Christmas if its market share doesn’t improve. But the sportsbook is undoubtedly on thin ice. PENN Entertainment sold its rights to the Barstool Sportsbook brand for pennies (literally — 100 of them, according to reports) and then agreed last August to pay ESPN $1.5 billion over 10 years to slap its name on a betting app. And since launching last November, ESPN Bet has not been helpful to PENN’s bottom line, and its national handle market share and GGR market share were both a mere 1.7% as of the end of July.

Despite the ESPN name, ESPN Bet is not making FanDuel, DraftKings, or even BetMGM sweat one bit. And PENN’s initial stated goal of a 20% market share by 2027 appears out of reach under the current conditions.

Everywhere you look in the industry, people are calling this NFL season make-or-break for ESPN Bet. It seems unfair to say a sportsbook’s first full football season could possibly “break” it, but with the rate at which operators are exiting the market, it does seem PENN needs to show some positive signs over these next six months.

ESPN Bet is expected to launch in New York any day now. That will certainly help its national market share, even though it may not translate into big profits given the Empire State’s punishing 51% tax rate. While ESPN is making strides in terms of integrating the betting brand into its non-betting apps, in other places, the app is drawing negative marks.

During PENN’s Q2 earnings call, Chief Technology Officer Aaron LeBarge said the launch in New York would help make this fall “an exciting opportunity to roll up my sleeves with our engineering and product teams to create a best-in-class experience for our customers.”

“Exciting opportunity” is quite the optimistic spin on what most observers see as a high-pressure sports season in which ESPN Bet needs to close the gap … or else.

2. Can DraftKings pass FanDuel?

Since the moment they launched in New Jersey ahead of most of the rest of the crowd in June 2018, FanDuel and DraftKings have been a two-headed monster atop the mobile sports betting mountain. Depending on whether you’re looking at handle or revenue and exactly which month you’re looking at, combined, the two DFS giants have controlled anywhere from 73-79% of the market throughout 2024.

But it’s not quite a “1” and “1a” situation. There is a clear-cut leader (even if not by a wide margin), and that leader is FanDuel.

This NFL season, the time of year when new and lapsed bettors are most likely to load and reload accounts, offers an opportunity for DraftKings to possibly flip the script.

The Boston-based company is certainly making moves. Last week, DK acquired Simplebet, with potential benefits to its in-play betting software and speed. The sportsbook is also placing an emphasis on expanding its player prop markets. DraftKings is also talking about adding streaming for NFL games to create a “bet-and-watch” experience.

Industry analysts have observed that DraftKings’ market share has been peaking this summer, heading into football season, and that it has more room to grow than FanDuel does.

Not that FD is resting on its laurels; FanDuel says it’s speeding up its in-game betting as well, upgrading its interface, and adding to the markets available for inclusion in Same Game Parlays, including defensive props and props for individual players in individual quarters of a game. It was FanDuel’s early commitment to pushing parlay betting and its launch of SGPs ahead of its rivals that helped make it No. 1 (especially in revenue) in the first place.

Whereas ESPN Bet is arguably in that “make or break” mode this NFL season, DraftKings and FanDuel are facing no such existential stakes. It’s “make or … make more” for these operators. And it’s not a foregone conclusion which one will be tops in revenue at season’s end.

3. Persist or desist for pick’em, sweepstakes betting? 

Cease-and-desist letters from state regulators to offshore and gray-market operators are all the rage these days. During the 2023 football season, it was “pick ‘em fantasy” operators, also known in some circles as “DFS+,” that were under the closest scrutiny and getting banned in certain states (or forced to switch from an against-the-house model to a peer-to-peer model). Will pick ‘em fantasy avoid the harsh spotlight this NFL season because regulators have found other targets?

It sure seems that way. One state after another has been trying to bounce Bovada, plus regulators are finding time to target sweepstakes sites — which are skewed toward online casino play, but also can include sports betting verticals. And as a result, the heat seems to be off those DFS+ operators, like PrizePicks and Underdog, as football season begins.

There’s a likelihood this is the NFL season in which pick ’em fantasy sites settle into feeling comfortable operating in the states they’re in. But it remains a story worth monitoring all season — along with the question of whether anyone tries to crack down on sweepstakes sportsbooks.

4. Now, players know better than to be bettors

In the spring of 2023, 10 NFL players were suspended for various violations of the league’s gambling policy. Those players have been reinstated, and the spring of 2024 has been remarkably quiet on the gambling-suspension front.

Or maybe the quiet is not remarkable at all. Maybe after the Calvin Ridley suspension for betting on games in 2021 and those 10 suspensions last year, players have finally gotten the message — which is basically, “if you’re thinking about gambling … don’t.”

There are some nuances, of course, but the idea may just have gotten through that if there’s any tiny chance that what you’re doing is against the rules, it’s not worth it. Risking a multi-million-dollar to get a couple hundred bucks down on a game? It just doesn’t add up.

The NFL has also stepped up its education efforts this year, making gambling-related training mandatory for every team. It’s unclear why it wasn’t mandatory before now, but, better late than never.

What it all adds up to is quite possibly an NFL season in which no player, no assistant coach, no stadium worker gets caught violating the league’s gambling policy. While the NBA and MLB are still grappling with getting their houses in order, the NFL’s player wagering problems may be a thing of the past.