Woodkirk Stone
Online sports betting operators said the 2022 Super Bowl brought a string of hit digital bets, offering a glimpse of how fast legal gambling is gaining traction in new markets such as New York.
BetMGM said a record number of new users signed up for its app on Sunday and it handled twice as many bets as it did during last year’s Super Bowl.
“We are encouraged by the strong results over the weekend, with Super Bowl LVI being the biggest Super Bowl bet to date,” said Adam Greenblatt, chief executive of BetMGM, the company between the British gaming company Entain and the MGM casino group. New York had the highest number of digital bets of any state, he added.
Rival gaming operator Penn National said the Super Bowl was “a record” in total bets, amount of money wagered and unique daily bettors for its Barstool Sportsbook platform.
GeoComply, the geolocation group, announced on Monday that it identified more than 80.1 million Super Bowl-related transactions over the weekend, well over double the number for Super Bowl 2021.
A representative for WynnBets, which operated in just two states during last year’s Super Bowl, said that as more states legalize online sports betting, “every year will break records.” WynnBets now operates in nine states.
Legal sports betting has proliferated in the United States since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a ban imposed on states outside of Nevada allowing bettors to bet on sports. This has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic as states regulate and tax gambling as a way to recoup money spent during the crisis. Twelve states, including Florida and North Carolina, began offering legal sports betting last year, bringing the total number of states that allow it to 31.
Sunday’s Super Bowl was the first since New York State legalized online sports betting earlier this year. Since then, New York, with a population of 20 million, has quickly become a dominant market for operators despite the imposition of a severe tax on gambling earnings, with people having already bet almost 2 billion dollars in bets, according to the governor’s office.
The American Gaming Association predicted that 31.4 million Americans would bet $7.6 billion on this year’s Super Bowl game between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals, an increase of nearly 80 % compared to last year. Individual states such as New York and New Jersey will release final figures for wagers placed on the game later this week, the organization said.
The adoption of sports betting in the United States, particularly for its most-watched game, is a marked change from 2008, when an NFL spokesperson told The New York Times that “we’re trying to make everything we can to ensure that our games are not betting vehicles”.
FanDuel said it paid more than $175 million for Sunday’s Super Bowl game, but declined to share the amount wagered on the platform during the event before its results were released on Friday.
GeoComply also said 5.6 million accounts accessed legal online sports betting over the weekend, a 95% increase over last year.
The operators engaged in fierce competition with each other as they vied for market share in the new states, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and bonus bets, leading fans to gamble with what they say is “free money”. Amy Howe, chief executive of FanDuel, told the Financial Times last year that the level of marketing spending was unsustainable.
BetMGM, which hasn’t been as aggressive in advertising as some rivals, said in January it expected the long-term cost of acquiring each customer to be around $250.
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