From seventh priority to market parity

♥The situation

Football (soccer, to most of its customers) was the operator’s seventh sport. It made real money, but engineering time went to the NFL, NBA and MLB by default, and the product showed it.

Benchmarking against the market leader found a gap of around 300 markets (roughly 500 against 800), nearly all of them combinable into same game parlays (bet builders). In-play was thin. Futures and outrights on major tournaments were priced and updated manually, taking about three hours of trader time every day.

Then the 2026 FIFA World Cup appeared on the horizon. The biggest sporting event in the world would be played in North American prime time, during a quiet summer with no NFL, NBA or NHL competing for attention. One shot at it, nine months out.

♠Why the gap had to close

Players bet where the bet they want is. A lightweight product offering sends them straight back to the competitor that has it.

Many US bettors were also new to football’s betting conventions, such as most markets settling after 90 minutes, with extra time excluded. No promotion removes that kind of friction. The product needed a step change, not another round of optimisation.

♦What we did

Before BetHeads, Simon Noble owned the football product strategy and roadmap at the operator. He led delivery across four squads and around 20 people, spanning trading, data science, engineering, operations and go-to-market.

Move 01Set outcomes, not features

The vision was simple. Build the definitive football betting experience on the platform, and make it outlast the tournament.

It was cascaded to every squad as five outcome targets (handle, hold, same game parlay share, parity with the market leader and market uptime). Nobody was measured on shipping features.

Move 02Four bets, and two firm refusals

Engineering capacity was fixed for nine months, so every yes was a no somewhere else. The roadmap was run through MoSCoW and sequenced on technical dependency as much as commercial value. Four bets made the cut.

• Same game parlay and player prop depth. The highest-margin product in the book, and the raw material for narrative-led marketing.
• Micro and fast markets. Short-window in-play betting, new ground for the football product.
• Extra time and outright pricing. A tournament-specific model, plus an automated engine pricing more than 100 team and player futures markets that traders had been updating by hand.
• Trader tooling. A redesign letting traders price multiple simultaneous fixtures from one screen. Unglamorous, and the tournament could not have been traded without it.

Two credible ideas were turned down. A live stats feed would have closed a genuine data gap, but only by pulling capacity from the four bets. Bookings and disciplinary markets were a simple won’t-have, as several of the largest regulated states prohibit them.

Saying no early is what kept everything else on schedule.

Move 03Sequence the roadmap

The plan ran in three horizons (now, next, later), each one a gate for the next.

The foundation work for “now” was the least visible and the most important. The existing feed integrations were an MVP with endpoints switched off. Without them, new markets could not be priced, game state could not be managed in play, and bets could not be settled accurately.

That meant building a data dictionary across three feed providers. Even the definition of a corner differed by supplier (awarded, confirmed or taken). That is the level of detail sportsbook product work actually runs on.

Move 04Let discovery change the answer

Two discovery tracks ran side by side. One confirmed the plan. The other reversed it.

Fast markets had no real football history to learn from, so the team used in-play behaviour from the Super Bowl and NBA Finals to guide them. It showed clear appetite for betting on the next few minutes. The offer launched with five validated market types on five-minute windows, then moved to one-minute windows once pricing, suspension and settlement had proved accurate.

For extra time, the obvious plan was a full simulation model. The historical data could not support one with confidence inside the timeline. A calibrated adjustment to existing odds had been dismissed early as a shortcut. Validated against Champions League and Europa League data, it proved accurate enough, and it is what shipped.

♣The result

Over the 2025-26 season, 60 new correlation-enabled football markets went live as part of this body of work, running at an 18% hold since launch. The wider catalogue grew past 800 active markets.

For the first time, the operator matched a key competitor on both football market breadth and same game parlay capability. Fast markets went live ahead of the opening match, turning in-play football into something that follows the action minute by minute.

The daily hours of manual futures pricing went to an automated engine. It was built for the World Cup, and it can be adapted to every league and competition that follows.

♥What other operators can take from it

• Product and content attract players. Market breadth and combinability keep them.
• Agree outcome targets before the roadmap. They make the hard trade-offs easier to defend.
• The most valuable roadmap decisions are often the ones you don’t do.
• Fix the data plumbing first. Reliable feeds, game state and settlement decide what you can price.
• Use discovery to cut risk before engineering is committed, and be prepared to drop the answer you started with.
• Plan for dependencies breaking. They will.

Client name and commercial values withheld for confidentiality. Results reflect pre-tournament performance.