Football player betting has a problem. How are sportsbooks solving it?

In the latest edition of Trader’s View, we previewed our upcoming webinar, Player betting is booming. Is your football product keeping up? Ahead of the session, we spoke to Dave Pilgrim (Midnite), Tom Hargreaves (BOYLE Sports) and Tomáš Polinský (Fortuna Entertainment Group) for their take on the challenges and opportunities facing operators when it comes to football player betting in 2026/27. 

Player markets and betbuilder remain two of the big football turnover drivers in the 2026/27 season. Yet for many sportsbooks, behind today’s product is a complex engine that involves data and pricing feeds from multiple suppliers, which leads to major trading challenges.

On a busy weekend of football, few things disrupt the in-play betting experience like frequent market and cash-out suspensions, and resulting errors. When player markets are priced and settled from different data sources to your betbuilder, inconsistencies and errors become an all-too-common headache.

Meanwhile, so-called “hidden” correlations across core markets, player markets, betbuilder and promotional markets, quietly build huge exposure on your most popular fixtures.

When customers want non-stop live football betting opportunities, it’s easy to see why the fragmented model of old no longer cuts it.

Ahead of our webinar, Dave, Tom and Tomáš shared Midnite, BOYLE Sports and FEG’s approach to delivering an engaging player-driven football product, that doesn’t sacrifice margin or stability.

Why player betting is booming now

Today’s bettor wants to bet on storylines and narratives that relate to the star players, not just the team. Betting behaviour has been shifting this way for years. Fantasy Premier League has over 11 million users this season, and its mainstream success reflects fans’ growing appetite for stats and player-level outcomes.

Midnite has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s fastest-growing operators, and according to Dave Pilgrim, the World Cup, where the likes of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham starred, was a huge catalyst for increased player betting: “The sheer number of games, low fixture concurrency and superstar-led betting behaviour made player combinations more appealing.”

Meanwhile, for BOYLE Sports the World Cup was the ideal testing ground for their new Squad Builder product. Tom shared: “Squad Builder takes the best of fantasy football and lets bettors build player-based combinations across multiple matches and even leagues, and convert it into a bet”.

Solving the pricing & risk headaches

But the rise of player-driven football betting isn’t without its trading conundrums. Market uptime, pricing accuracy and resulting errors are among the common challenges that Genius Sports enables trading teams to solve – yet risk management is often a less talked about challenge.

For FEG, where player markets have long been popular on ice hockey fixtures in markets like the Czech Republic, growing player market turnover helps spread exposure more evenly, rather than concentrating liability on a handful of match results. According to Tomáš, “Player props can also reduce reliance on favourite-heavy football outcomes, and they’re typically higher margin.”

However, Dave cautions against ignoring “hidden liabilities” that often come with increased betbuilder and player market turnover that many American operators saw on the NFL last season, where popular players frequently went over their rushing yards and receiving yards totals.

“When selections in a betbuilder are correlated, the old accumulator maths no longer applies. They’re no longer independent, they’re now relational, which means those Black Swan moments can hit you harder. The danger grows when many customers land on the same popular combinations, which can be challenging for sportsbooks to spot.”

Automated margin optimisation software, such as Edge, helps operators solve this complex pricing headache through liability-driven pricing adjustments on a fixture-level which account for these correlations between singles and betbuilder markets, such as First Goalscorer, Total Goals, and Player Total Shots.

Delivering a context-driven product

With the pricing foundations in place, delivering player markets contextually within the sportsbook app is how operators can grow turnover and, crucially, differentiate their experience from rival sportsbooks.

BOYLE Sports’ Squad Builder gives users more control over the player markets and allows them to combine fixtures and leagues, or select pre-packaged options without friction. “35% of Squad Builder turnover goes through pre-packaged bet types, compared to build-it-yourself style bets.” said Tom.

Tomáš added that for FEG adding context and stats to the sportsbook experience is a must in order to educate customers “Offering a market on shots or cards means little if a customer doesn’t have a view of a player’s stats over the season. That’s even more important in-play because customers have seconds, not minutes, to decide.”

Looking ahead, Dave added that if the industry expects player betting to continue to grow, operators need to solve and simplify how they deliver relevant football markets to the end user.

“Most in-app sports betting customer journeys are built around sport, competition, event, market, which works against player-led journeys. You really want to surface the player-related market first, and then all the stats and context around a specific player.”

For Genius Sports, experiences like BetVision and PreBuilt betbuilder feed have helped operators solve this challenge through intelligent curation of relevant markets based on live game context.

Product parity vs differentiation

Having spent over 20 years at Sky Bet, Dave knows only too well the arms race that can develop between sportsbooks as they compete on new features. But there comes a point where the race stops paying off.

“Time spent matching competitors to reach parity is time not spent on something distinctive or unique that customers will remember and return to. However, once enough of the biggest brands launch and market a feature, after a while it becomes a reason for a customer to churn if you don’t have it. “Super Sub” is fast becoming an example of this.”

BOYLE Sports, which has built a reputation for being fast to market with new features, has taken a deliberate approach, “Competing with leading operators on a commoditised product like betbuilder was always going to be tricky, but on Squad Builder, we felt we could win.”

On 29^th October Will Wescott will be quizzing all the speakers further on how sportsbooks can solve the pricing and risk complexities that come with the rise of player betting, and create a leading football player market product for the 2026/27 and beyond.

Join us and you can put your own questions to the speakers via our live Q&A.

Don’t miss it, register now.