Market Make-up: German books conform but do offer variety

The Market Make-up series continues as Jake Pollard and Propus Partners monitor German sportsbook offerings.  Though Germany sees a conformity on margin controls, bookmakers contrast by offering a wide range of unique betting markets and features like bet builders, and significant variation in the number of markets and overrounds applied across different operators.

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As part of its ongoing series of reports examining European betting markets, Propus Partners gathered data from the German bookmakers for the week 6 matches of the 2023-24 UEFA Champions League. The list of operators was chosen to represent the market leaders and the data has been analysed to give a high-level overview of how bookmakers within Germany offer Tier 1 soccer events.

Deutsche takeaways:

• There is a high amount of conformity within the market on margins.
• Winamax, one of the most recent entrants to the German market, is the most aggressive on margin, especially on the 1X2 (match winner) market.
• The number of betting markets on offer vary greatly across the different operators.
• Most operators analysed have their own technology and teams, which enables them to offer unique betting markets.
• Most operators offer bet builder, at least on pre-match.

Explainer: overround and expected hold margin

European sportsbooks tend to use ‘overrounds’ or ‘expected hold margin’ as measures of margin application:

• Overrounds are calculated by summing up the ‘implied probabilities’ of all selections in a market, for example, a 1.909 vs. 1.909, would have an overround of: 100 / 1.909 + 100 / 1.909 = 104.76
• The overround is a measure of how much a bookmaker would expect to take in order to expect to pay out 100
• Expected hold margin is calculated by 1-100 / overround. In the example: 1 – 100 / 104.76 = 0.0455 or 4.55%

Margin comparison

The chart below shows the average overrounds applied to match result, total goals and Asian Handicap markets, for both pre-match and in-play, during matchday 6 of this season’s UEFA Champions League. The data was collected within two hours of kick-off of each match. 

• The most aggressive operator from this sample is bet365, which maintains the same margins for other regions as well as Germany, many of which are highly competitive in terms of margins (this includes 102% on Asian Handicap, which brings the average down considerably).
• Winamax actually offers the lowest match result margin of 103%, which is likely due to the fact they are a new entrant trying to win market share.
• Pre-match 1X2 (match winner) markets are those with the lowest average margin applied. This is no surprise given this market is the most visible and commonly comparable.
• The total goals market sees a lowest pre-match overround of 105% from bet365 and the same for in-play. DAZNBet also offers 105% across the three markets analysed for in-play. As with Winamax, this is likely a marketing tactic by DAZN as a new operator in the market.
• Across the whole sample (all operators and market types), an average pre-match overround of 106.2 is applied, with 107.3 taken in-play.

Markets per event

The chart below shows the average number of markets available for each event within the sample. Note, each bookmaker groups markets in different ways, so we have used a standardised approach for a fair comparison.

We don’t necessarily believe that more markets is always a good thing, the range and different types of markets, their uniqueness, and how they are presented, is often more important, however it is still an interesting measure of what is being offered to customers.

• The number of pre-match markets varies a lot across German operators, with one group within the cohort (888, bet-at-home, bet365, Interwetten and Tipico) offering over 120, while the rest typically offer around 90 markets.
• 888, bet-at-home, bet365, Interwetten and Tipico across pre-match and in-play, are the operators offering the most betting markets. All, except for bet-at-home, have multiple suppliers and in-house technology.
• BetVictor seems very conservative in approach with the lowest pre-match selection and on the lower end of the in-play offering too.

Unique markets & bet builders

The German market has a number of operators that have their own technology, trading and risk management teams. What this allows, in theory, is for them to differentiate as they control their own product:

• The majority of operators analysed offer unique content to their customers. This will drive the overall market and make it difficult for those other operators without this ability
• The German market sees most operators offering, at least, a build-your-own bet builder product, not merely a set of pre-canned selections. We would say this is standard in a mature European market
• We see more variation than in France, with operators that are active in both markets offering different products to their customers. This likely shows the restrictions placed on operators in France by regulation, in comparison to Germany’s slightly less restrictive regulations with regard to markets benign allowed and payout ratios.

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This article is published by SBCNews in partnership with Gaming&Co.