Sports and betting: Can the two ‘buddies’ learn from each other?

Sports and betting are buddies that can’t do without each other thinks STATSCORE’s Jakub Myszkorowski. Yet have we got so used to the way they get on, that we’ve stopped trying to learn from one another? 

Myszkorowski explains how betting organisations can boost their own businesses by looking at how sports teams analyse their opponents, optimise performance and integrate new ideas.

Analyse your opponents

Top football clubs have extraordinary technical teams packed with specialists. Amid physios, fitness coaches, diet leaders you can find also professionals solely responsible for analysing the opponents. 

All they do is focus on what makes your top rivals successful and what turns their wins into failures. This knowledge is today, arguably, the most valuable currency on the competitive market. 

The faster, deeper and better you can analyse what your opponents do, the more chance that you won’t copy their biggest mistakes. You can also hope to follow some of the successful paths too.

Let’s think, honestly, if we replicate this in our line of work. As organisations so focused on our own growth, do we forget to focus on what makes our competitors… ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’?

We should be open to this sort of market analysis rather than simply trying to be superior without an understanding of the competition.

Optimise your performance

When you look at a top basketball or football team, it’s hard to miss how packed their agendas are throughout the season – often playing matches every few days. 

Playing games so frequently means that you need to plan well each day as you spend almost half of your time travelling. How and where to train? What to focus on? When to secure a proper rest? How to make the athletes’ bodies prepared to deliver their best each time?

Professional sport is all about these things. Is your business too? Did you analyse if your website works well on every device and with any possible browser? Do your widgets upload fast enough in countries where fast internet on mobile is not always available? 

There are so many more questions like these that I could name here, but instead of wasting your time let’s leave it at this – take the time to consider how you can better optimise your own performance.

And if you’re wondering how we did it at STATSCORE, where we care so much about the delivery of products for our partners, just reach out to learn more from our experiences.

Yesterday’s paths will be useless tomorrow

You might not know that in my past life I used to be a football coach. To cut a long story short, people quickly realised that I wasn’t equipped to tell the Galácticos where they were going wrong.

In any case, years ago I joined a second-tier club in my home country as an assistant coach. Our goal was clear – to get promoted. For some time, it seemed like we were on the right path. Then the winter interlude of the season came and we all kicked off for the preparation camps.

Since the methods we used for the practices were… well… ‘different’, I asked the head coach what made him choose these drills. He was quite enthusiastic as he opened his old notebook telling me: ‘See – this is my complete routine from one of my former clubs were we won promotion. We will do the same here!’

It was a concern for me to realise that we were just copy and pasting ‘ancient’ sporting practices. And guess what… we did not achieve the promotion we wanted. What a surprise.

So before you keep on building your betting business in the same way you did it years ago, maybe it is time to analyse what is driving success today? Why is everyone going all mobile? Yes, we know you love your local kiosks but wouldn’t being available through every device and at all times of the day be better?

The world of betting is changing. There are more and more new challengers that know their only chance is to be better tailored for the changing needs of the market. 

To remain superior to them, you do not need to give up on everything that has taken your company to the position you occupy today, but you need to be open to mixing evergreen practices with fresh ideas.