When it comes to worldwide sports betting, football is the undisputed champion of the entire industry. Of course what you picture when you hear the word “football” will be heavily influenced by what part of the world you’re from, but wherever it is you happen to come from, some form of football is the local betting favorite.
Nowhere is football’s dominance in the sports betting world more pronounced than in the figures recently released by Bodog, which also happens to be one of the world’s leading purveyors of online sports betting. According to their most recent numbers, more than 80 percent of the action they saw last month was from US football. Of that astonishing number, approximately 47 percent of the action was on professional football and around 39 percent was on college games.
The US football numbers are certainly influenced by sports betting’s newfound credibility but they’re even more impressive when one considers that only a patchwork of college teams are playing and the NFL is suffering from plenty of COVID-related issues.
Of the remaining sports none of them charted any more than four percent of the action that Bodog saw last weekend, according to a report published on CalvinAyre.com. Of the top ten most wagered on events last weekend at Bodog, eight were professional football games and two were college football games.
These numbers are very much in line with what industry insiders have always known about US sports betting habits. The challenge for the expanded US sports betting industry is how to find football levels of enthusiasm during the two thirds of the year when football is not played.