Trader's View | What's new for in-play football?

Thomas Holland, VP Product at Genius Sports, knows the pressure football trading teams are under: expanding in-play markets, growing complex liabilities and costly suspensions at pivotal moments. He explains how automation, advanced modelling and data innovation are helping operators protect margin, maximise uptime and drive in-play growth in 2026.

As we head into the business end of the domestic European season – with the battle for silverware hotting up – finding new ways to engage football customers and grow margins is top-of-mind for every trading team. In a World Cup year, this is truer than ever.

With betbuilder, player markets, cash out and micro-betting all parts of today’s football betting experience, the key lies in maximising engagement with these markets – especially in-play.

In terms of product, the intricacies of modelling rich in-play market offerings on a busy gameweek, while ensuring rapid bet placement, settlement, and managing complex and fast-changing risk exposure, is no easy feat. After all, last year Entain reported the football betbuilder stakes more than doubled.

2026 is proving a big year of football. It’s never been more important to ensure your product is set-up for success. From market-uptime to liability-driven pricing to betbuilder, let’s unpack it all.

Turning the “big” moments into in-play turnover

Every goal and every dangerous attack is a chance to grow in-play revenues. Yet, too often, these game-changing moments are riddled with market suspensions. Take last week’s Spurs vs Crystal Palace game. The moment Micky van de Ven was sent-off with Spurs 1-0 up at the time, the momentum suddenly shifted towards Palace.

If your customers were not able to get a bet down the moment that narrative changed, they likely shifted to a rival sportsbook app in an attempt to do so instead.

It’s why we’ve invested heavily in our modelling technology in recent years. So far in 2026, we’ve on average delivered over 12 minutes extra market availability per fixture (vs other trading suppliers).

It’s part of a journey to eliminate suspension time entirely. In a previous Trader’s View, I talked about our shift to Monte Carlo simulations. For your sportsbook, the result is sharp pricing that keeps markets open at the most pivotal moments (like a goal or during stoppage time).

If a team misses a big chance, our model simulation restarts based on that exact game state. When it comes to stoppage time, our new model even estimates added time based on league averages, and the stoppages already accrued in each half. It’s another way to maximise betting engagement in the exciting final moments of the action.

Automation the key to World Cup margin growth

I’ve been there. Manually monitoring liabilities on a football fixture. Except today, there are more in-play market-types available than ever, and more fixtures than ever. So managing liabilities is understandably complex, especially when you consider risk exposure across all possible markets – for example, markets like Match Result, Team Total Goals, and First Goalscorer which all relate. If you’re at risk for one, you’re usually at risk for the other too – and the only way to stay ahead is with the right tools and automation.

This will be even more pronounced at this summer’s World Cup. For many operators, betting activity will be geared towards the local nation – whether it’s England, Germany, South Africa or Brazil – and your liabilities will follow suit. Imagine the impact if you’re a Brazilian operator, and your customers are betting on everything from Brazil to Win to Vinícius Júnior to score next, or Brazil to record 10.5+ shots on target?

The answer is not blunt instruments like limits and delays, but instead advanced software like Edge.

Forward-thinking trading teams are utilising Edge to dynamically adjust pricing based on their own customer betting activity in real-time. Forget risk management – it’s true profit maximisation.

It means your odds are optimised on a fixture level, with your risk all in order – even across correlated markets. You set a margin threshold – and the impact is clear. One Edge client is seeing a 22% margin growth on football.

It’s the balance every trader wants: maximum uptime and engagement, and guaranteed margin protection at the same. And the best thing? It’s all automated.

In-play betbuilder is 2026’s big bet

I mentioned Entain reported that football betbuilder stakes more than doubled last year. This is a global shift.

• 20% of all bets in Spain were betbuilders, driven by the Copa America and Euros. That’s no surprise for European markets, where fans love corners, cards and shots markets.
• Across Africa, pre-match betbuilder is key to retail betting (and increasingly popular on mobile), with long-odds acca bets with low-stakes commonplace.
• In the U.S., SGPs surpassed single bets for some sportsbooks on the NFL Super Bowl last year.
• In Brazil, Entain also reported as much as 40% of all bets on key domestic fixtures like Corinthians vs. Palmeiras were betbuilders.

It’s clear from the data that betbuilder is a powerful retention tool on football. That’s why we’ve expanded MultiBet, our betbuilder product, with new player assist and shots on target markets, available both pre-match and in-play.

Yet too many operators still see betbuilder as a pre-match product. Last year, our own internal research showed that 58% of European sportsbooks still don’t offer an in-play betbuilder for football.

For pre-match, many operators successfully deliver pre-built betbuilder markets. Simplifying the UX, these products allow users to easily bet on relevant betbuilders without having to manually build their own. Delivering this in-play comes with challenges – in terms of processing price updates and keeping betbuilder combinations relevant as the match unfolds – but the art is in the speed of your data and model robustness.

This is where our newly-upgraded PreBuilt feed comes in. It’s powered by the same trading model as our core football product, and provides pre-packaged betbuilders aligned to key narratives and the match state to help drive in-play turnover.

This is a proven way to grow in-play football engagement, and fast becoming a must-have for sportsbooks in online markets.

“The BetVision effect”

It’s no secret the betting engagement is changing. As player markets, micro-markets and betbuilder continue to rise, the demand for rich, stats-driven content is rising with equal pace: 70% of sports fans seek team and player stats, while 67% want all sports data in one place (Capgemini).

The desire for more contextual betting experiences is the underlying driver behind the success of BetVision. Launched in 2023, BetVision is now live with over 100 operators.

For one U.S. operator, BetVision retains ⅓ of users on a monthly basis, and is increasing average bet size by 63%.

When you consider how today’s sports bettor consumes live football, and places bets, BetVision brings all the best parts into your sportsbook app.

Functionality like Contextual Market Recommendation and “Touch-to-Bet” is proving particularly popular because it puts bettors in the driver’s seat. Whether its highly-relevant micro-markets prompted within the BetVision UI, such as Goal in the Next 5 Minutes, or allowing users to browse player markets and bet on them via an integrated betslip, BetVision is setting a new standard for in-play.

In a space where legacy streaming solutions have struggled to deliver measurable value, BetVision is delivering a major difference. Available for Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Brasilerao, BetVision is growing time spent in the app by 14.5%. It’s a must-have for operators looking to grow in-play turnover this year.

What’s next? A new world of sports data

What am I most excited about for 2026? The potential of utilising Genius’ rich player tracking and auto-eventing datasets to further sharpen our pricing.

Our Monte Carlo model – which is underpinned by machine learning and AI – is built with this first-of-a-kind data in mind. Match events like goals, shots and corners will automatically be captured and recognised via automated camera systems installed in the stadium, through our official league partnerships. Captured by powerful machines, this data is the source of truth and will drive better pricing efficiency and certain bet settlement on historically subjective metrics, like Shots on Target.

Even more uptime, with even sharper pricing – including on micro and player prop markets late in games. It’s set to be a major step forward.

Thanks to new machine technologies and breakthroughs in data, football trading is evolving right before our eyes. If you’re looking to level-up your football product in 2026, our in-play solutions are exactly what you need.