Where Betting Belongs · September 2026
A million matches a year. Where would you even start?
Sports betting has never offered more. More sports, more matches, more markets on every match and prices that change by the second. For people who bet every day, that is the point. For the fan who just wants a bet on the game they are watching, it is a wall. This paper puts numbers on the wall.
The headlines
Betting, by the numbers.
Open a betting app on a Saturday afternoon and count what is on offer. Football from all over the world, racing from several countries, then tennis, darts, snooker, table tennis, cricket, basketball and ice hockey. Every game and race has hundreds of markets, and many of the prices change by the second. Someone who bets every day will love that. A fan who just wants a bet on the match they are watching has to find it first.
I wanted to put some numbers on how big the menu has become. The figures below come from data suppliers, betting platforms, bookmakers and regulators. They measure different things, so they should not be added together, but they give a good sense of the scale.
Every day, all day
Sportradar says it now covers more than a million matches a year, after buying IMG ARENA in 2025. (source 1) That is over 2,700 matches a day. Not every one of them is priced by every bookmaker, but it shows how much supply there is.
Racing alone runs almost every day of the year. Great Britain had 1,460 race meetings planned for 2025 and Ireland held 390, with 33,230 runners. (source 3, 4) SIS, which sends pictures and data to betting shops and apps, says it shows around 45,000 races a year. (source 2)
By July 2024, people in Colorado had bet more than $400 million on table tennis. (source 13) Colorado is not a hotbed of table tennis fans. There is simply always a match on somewhere.
The match is the market
Betting carries on after kick-off. Entain says about nine in ten of its tennis bets are placed while the match is being played, and a study of 3.8 million US bettors found 52% of sports bets in 2024 were placed live. (source 5, 6) Sportradar expected its new tennis micro markets, such as who wins the next point, to add about 1,500 betting options to a single match. (source 7) That is what is available, not what people bet on.
One match, thousands of bets
Nobody publishes a count of the bets available on a football match, and with bet builders there is no real limit. At the 2026 World Cup, Kambi's partners took more than 700,000 different bet builder combinations on each semi-final, and more than 100 million bets on the tournament with two games still to go. Live bet builder turnover was ten times what it was in 2022. (source 8)
The bet types add more on top. A Goliath, eight picks on one slip, is 247 separate bets. (source 9) Funteron's betting dictionary has more than 160 terms, and that is just to explain what is on offer.
Where the money is made
There is a good commercial reason for all this. In New Jersey in 2025, parlays (accumulators) were about 32% of the money staked on completed events, $3.94 billion of $12.25 billion. They made about 65% of the revenue, $755 million of $1.16 billion. Bookmakers kept 19.2% of what was staked on parlays and about 4.9% of everything else. (source 10) In bet365's first month in Illinois, parlays were 52.5% of its stakes and 74% of its revenue. (source 11)
In Great Britain, online betting made £2.4 billion in the year to March 2026. Football brought in £1.2 billion and horse racing £769.3 million. (source 12)
Plenty of people enjoy accas and bet builders, and bookmakers have built what their most active customers want. But when the complicated bets make the most money, the products will keep getting bigger and busier.
What the numbers do not show
A big menu does not mean fans dislike it, and a profitable bet type is not a bad one. What an experienced bettor values is different from what a newcomer can follow. The Gambling Commission lists product design and risk as a research priority, including how well people understand probability. (source 14) It does not say that a certain number of markets causes harm, and I am not saying that either.
The house wine
There are millions of wines in the world. Every grape, every vineyard, every year, at every price from a fiver to a small fortune. So have a guess. What is the most popular wine in the world?
Ask anyone who runs a restaurant. It is the house wine. The house red, the house white, the house rosé: whatever the house recommends. The list runs to pages, and one line on it does more work than any other. A Harpers survey of more than 1,000 British drinkers found 23% normally order the house wine. When OpenTable asked 2,000 Britons, two in three said they always choose it. The surveys differ on how many, but the house wine is the choice for a lot of people. (source 15, 16)
That is not because people know nothing about wine. Most of them simply do not want to pick from a list of four hundred bottles. They want someone they trust to choose a good one, so they can get on with enjoying their evening. The full list is there for anyone who wants it. Most people just want the recommendation.
Betting is no different. A million matches and 700,000 combinations is the wine list. Most fans want the house wine: one good, simple bet on the match in front of them, suggested by someone they trust, so they can get back to watching.
The fan starts somewhere else
Fans think in moments. When a penalty is given, the fan wants to know if it goes in. At break point, they want to know who wins the next point. They should not have to work out whether that lives under match odds, specials or player props.
The fix is fewer steps between the fan and the bet they want, not fewer bets.
Show the bet in money
The bet itself should be just as clear. A £10 bet at 3/1 pays back £40 if it wins: your £10 plus £30 winnings. If it loses, you lose £10. The price implies about a 25% chance, and that figure includes the bookmaker's margin. A fan should see that in pounds, without doing the sums, with fractions and decimals there for anyone who prefers them.
Simple has to mean safe as well: proper age and identity checks, limits and spending that are easy to see, losses shown as clearly as wins and help close at hand.
Where betting belongs
Media brands and sports already have the fan's attention. They can offer an optional bet that fits what is on screen, instead of sending the fan off to search another app. The brand brings the moment and the relationship, and licensed bookmakers bring the prices, the accounts and the regulation.
Not every fan should bet. But the adults who choose to should understand what they are doing, inside the sport they came to watch. Give them the house wine, and keep the full list for anyone who asks for it.
The Funteron approach
Funteron puts a betting experience inside the apps, channels and sites of media brands and sports, supported by licensed bookmakers. It starts with the event and the moment, shows every price in money and keeps the full range for those who want it. Funteron sets no odds, holds no funds and accepts no bets. funteron.com
About the figures: supplier and bookmaker figures cover their own networks or customers. New Jersey figures are the regulator's unaudited numbers for completed events. Each figure is for its own period and they should not be added together. Not investment advice. 18+. Please gamble responsibly.
Sources
- Sportradar, Sportradar closes 2025 with significant growth and expanded share repurchase plan, 5 March 2026. sportradar.com
- SIS, rights holders page (undated). www.sis.tv
- British Horseracing Authority, BHA publishes 2025 fixture list, 7 August 2024. www.britishhorseracing.com
- Horse Racing Ireland, Statistics for 2025 reveal many positives for Irish racing, 28 January 2026. www.hri.ie
- Entain, US Open 2025 to become most bet on tennis major in history, 21 August 2025. www.entaingroup.com
- SBC Americas, Optimove in-play betting report, 17 January 2025. sbcamericas.com
- Sportradar, Sportradar drives betting innovation with micro markets expansion, 19 September 2024. sportradar.com
- Kambi Group, Kambi delivers record-breaking World Cup with more than 100 million bets, 16 July 2026. mfn.se
- Sporting Life, What is a Goliath bet? (undated). sportinglife.com
- New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, December 2025 revenue statistics, completed events table. www.nj.gov
- InGame, Illinois sports betting revenue, March 2025. www.ingame.com
- Gambling Commission, Industry statistics, April 2025 to March 2026, 17 September 2026. www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk
- Covers, Table tennis tops $400 million all-time handle in Colorado sports betting, 1 July 2024. www.covers.com
- Gambling Commission, Evidence theme 5: product characteristics and risk, updated 11 July 2024. www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk
- Harpers, On-trade losing thousands of pounds in wine sales says new Harpers consumer report (Demystifying Restaurant and Bar Consumers, over 1,000 British drinkers), 8 August 2014. harpers.co.uk
- Decanter, Young Britons don't know what a sommelier is, reporting an OpenTable survey of 2,000 UK adults, March 2017. www.decanter.com