The impact of the Coronavirus on the sports betting industry

We all know that due to the pandemic, sports have ultimately been cancelled for a while to reduce the amount of infections but how has this impacted the sports betting industry? I will explore the numbers, what people have done to continue their betting needs and where from here?

International sports betting is estimated to have a market capitalization of $250 billion (as of October 2019). It is likely that this number has drastically decreased due to the shortage of betting options. As you can see from the table below, the percentage change from late January (when the Coronavirus spread through the world like a wildfire) to late March has seen negative results for all of the major players in the sports betting market.

Since the major sporting leagues have temporarily been halted or ended, customers have continued to place bets on a variety of other options. Examples of alternatives include, obscure country football betting, Moldova and Belarus for example, betting on the weather, stocks and shares and also reality TV shows. This indicates that people are really engrained into the betting world and will bet on anything to satisfy their fix.

What now?

I think that it is quite clear that the future of sports betting is online. Thanks to technology development, users face very little complications of creating betting accounts and online betting. Since physical betting shops have been shut due to the coronavirus, online sports betting has seen a 225% increase of first-time online gamblers since the lockdown started.

Technology has changed how we operate. It has also revolutionized the methods and options that we use to bet on sports. No one is 100% sure what the next factor is going to be in the digital revolution but we can be sure that it will make betting on sports more exciting and promising.