Do you have any idea about the revenues in gambling business? We can demonstrate the numbers using the revenues of the gambling giant bet365 in 2018/2019 and 2019/2020. The revenue has dropped to £2.8 billion down from £3.06 billion but the company still managed to increase the number of employees from 4,708 to almost 5,200.
There are indeed many sources of the income behind those numbers, but the most significant ones are casino, live casino and sports betting. There is no doubt that casino gambling is a matter of pure luck. The settings of RTP (long term Return to a Player) are on average 5% and there is no way to fool the system. This fact is the reason why casino gambling gets so much criticism.
Is sports betting any better when it comes to revenues?
Bet365 runs their business in the UK and online casino UK might seem to be the most profitable source of the income. But what about sports betting? Is there anything better about sportsbooks? Now let’s forget about bet365 and talk about all the bookies. We can indeed argue that the results of football games are not set ahead of the game and this is simply another fact (leaving out the possible match fixing). Let’s pick 2 teams and imagine a mutual game.
First we have [team 2] from [league 9] and then we have [team 353] from [league 85]. It is quite easy to tell the winner between the winner of [league 8] and the last team of the fourth Bulgarian league. But try to predict the result between the German and English teams from second national leagues, who are about the same strength with no mutual match history.
This is even a hard to knock issue for the bookmakers as well. The game can go either way and if the probabilities are not easy to predict, then you have to play it safe. But how do you do that? In the regular games within any national leagues the probabilities are a daily routine. There you can find fixtures with market margin below 3% and bookmakers still keep the upper hand.
Not sure about the outcome? Increase the margin
With fixtures like the mentioned one, you will most likely keep the margin above 10% – and that is what happens quite often. Coming up with the probabilities for this fixture takes a lot of analysing. Players, strategies, form, moods… all this needs to be taken into account.
At the end it is bookmakers who do the job more accurately and this can only mean one thing. Most of you lose. Most of you get bored by the analysis and end up betting with the heart.
Betting is work and it is a tough one. If you are not able to spend dozens of hours looking at statistics, numbers, analysing players, strategies, then betting is not for you. I mean, you can have it as a hobby, but in that case you have to accept loss. Just like in the case of other hobbies, since all of them cost money.
Back to numbers
The average market margin in online casino is considered to be 5% (e.g. slots), while the average market margin on sports betting is considered to be 7%. While in online casino you have to accept the 5% as a fact, we do not know if the claimed 7% on average in sports betting are really what the bookmaker keeps. We tried to look into the details of many annual reports of gambling operators, but none of them shows how much earnings came from casino gambling and how much from sports betting. This makes me ask a basic question. Why? Why do you keep your income from sportsbooks a secret?
