This year was a big one for Norwegian football. With Erling Haaland up front, the national team not only marked its return to the grand stage of the World Cup, they cemented their position as one of its biggest challengers.
With widely publicised clashes against the likes of Brazil and England, this unsurprisingly led a surge of activity for Norsk Tipping, the state-owned betting firm, and its technology partner, Sportradar.
In the first of this two part overview, SBC News takes a look back at a world Cup to remember with Hans Erland Ringsvold, Head of Sports, Casino and Poker at Norsk Tipping, and Jens Nielsen, Principal Advisor, Platform and Partnerships at Sportradar.
Norway returned to the World Cup following a 28-year absence, how did Norsk Tipping prepare for this special occasion?
Hans Erland Ringsvold: Through the winter, with the success of our national team and the success of Bodø/ Glimt, we got a nice preview of what we could expect during the tournament. Both with regards to customer journeys, system performance and last but definitely not least, the volatility you get when you only operate in one country, and “everyone” plays with their heart first and foremost.
Working with Sportradar, we made the World Cup a strategic target and established a task force with key resources from multiple departments internally. Presenting risk, status and expectations to the board, our main message was ‘keep calm even though our RTP will fluctuate’.
We involved every team that could impact the success of the World Cup. The business areas within sports; both operations, development and suppliers involved in the value chain of course, but also all supporting teams such as customer support, customer services, marketing, payment, id, responsible gaming, tech-departments.
Together we delivered a lot of improvements, both enhancements and securing optimal system performance. We conducted stress testing of systems, removing bottlenecks and improvements in general. We even did scenario testing involving all resources that would be affected if we failed to deliver on expectations! Preparation was key.
Can you share some of Norsk Tipping’s key stats from the tournament with us? Overall customer numbers, spikes in engagement and activity, proportion of bets placed on key markets, and so on?
Hans Erland Ringsvold: Compared to Euro 2024, which we referred to at the time as our all-time record championship, we tripled our revenue and doubled our customer numbers.
Obviously, it was Norway’s matches that were the most popular, culminating in the quarter-final against England. After Norway’s elimination, the World Cup bubble burst and that was obvious both in the public in general, the fans and in our books. The final did bring the engagement back again.
Although 1×2 is still the largest object, we see that share decreasing with each championship. There was greater interest in player props this time around, we had a good selection of markets on goals, assists and pre-canned bet builder objects. Interest in these markets was helped along by the fact we have Haaland on our team.
In addition to player props, we saw a strong increase in pre-canned bet builders, totals, both teams to score and correct score.
Jens, was there a lot of excitement at Sportradar to be working with Norsk Tipping during this World Cup?
Jens Nielsen: Absolutely there was. This was a historic moment for Norwegian football, the country’s first World Cup appearance since 1998. Both inside and outside of Norway there was significant interest in the team, the biggest star players like Haaland and Ødegaard, and the way Norway qualified for the competition, beating Italy at home and away with attacking football. It all added to the excitement and the expectations.
With all that in mind, we anticipated a high level of engagement across the Norsk Tipping sportsbook and prepared to process a high volume of bets over the course of the competition, particularly on days where Norway played.
Was there anything that made Sportradar’s operation unique this time around?
Jens Nielsen: Supporting sportsbook operators through peak events is our core business. We are there for our clients with one objective: keeping them available and successful, so this was familiar territory for us. However, what made this one special was being so close to a remarkable period of Norwegian football history being made, and we were proud to work alongside Norsk Tipping to handle the extraordinary lift in activity and the very high peaks on specific match days.
The engagement from Norway fans this summer was unprecedented with approximately 20% of the adult Norwegian population placing a World Cup bet with Norsk Tipping during the tournament.
To support massive surges in activity and traffic peaks reaching 172 bets per second, we safeguarded our capacity proactively to ensure our sportsbook platform delivered full uptime throughout the tournament.
And what were the highlights of your partnership with Norsk Tipping this World Cup? What stood out for you?
Jens Nielsen: It was a great example of how customer facing excellence backed by technological reliability can combine to great effect as our two organisations partnered to deliver record breaking success.
Compared to the 2022 World Cup, this tournament delivered a 273% increase in the number of active clients for Norsk Tipping and an uplift of 373% in the number of bets placed.
World Cup fever peaked during Norway’s quarter final against England, surpassing the previous Norway-Brazil record by 48%.
Hans, how did you manage the risk of pricing Norway, in a World Cup tournament where the Norwegians outperformed expectations?
Hans Erland Ringsvold: Even though Norway had not been in a championship for 28 years, we did not enter the championship completely unprepared. Bodø/Glimt’s incredible Champions League season showed how excited our customers get by good Norwegian performances.
This allowed us to experiment with how we operate when Norway is the outsider. This was useful for us, especially in the matches against France, Brazil and England – where Norway were relatively big outsiders, and our customers wanted to place their bets with their heart.
If we had only driven risk management against our own book, Norway would have become favourites in all these matches – but even though we only operate in Norway, we cannot differentiate too much against the international market. The experience from Bodø/Glimt’s meeting with Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League in particular was useful for us, where we were close to ending up with creating arbitrage opportunities in the market.
We made a lot of money from regular customers, but the more professional customer segment ended up with the wins. We have concluded that in these situations we would rather let “Ola Oddsbong” (the recreational player) win – than give sharks the opportunity to place value bets on the favourite.
Jens, how significant a challenge was odds processing and generation during a high-pressure, high-volume tournament like this?
Jens Nielsen: Volumes are growing, as is the need to process transactions and deliver data in real time with increasingly low latency. We have grown alongside those demands and prepared for them by adopting technologies, including cloud infrastructure, that allow us to scale.
Availability always comes first for our sportsbook clients. Being able to deliver the services they rely on is our duty. During this tournament, I believe we demonstrated a very high level of consistency and quality.
More broadly, what was Sportradar’s experience of betting volume this tournament? How did volume compare with other major tournaments, whether previous World Cups and Euros, or popular domestic European tournaments?
Jens Nielsen: The expanded format of this year’s World Cup makes it difficult for a complete comparison to previous events. Beforehand, we were mindful that the increase in matches wouldn’t automatically lead to an increase in betting volumes.
The Round of 16 matches onwards proves a good indication of how fan engagement increased compared to the previous World Cup in 2022. An analysis on behalf of 250 sportsbook clients via Sportradar’s Managed Trading Services shows a 110% increase in the number of bets for this year’s final compared to four years ago.
The average number of bets and average turnover per game have also increased significantly, and the total increase exceeded our expectations.
Come back tomorrow for part two of Norsk Tipping and Sportradr’s World Cup overview
