When Andy Phillips joined Sporting Risk, the company was beginning to explore how technology developed around betting and predictive modelling could be turned into a broader B2B proposition. The business had already taken its first steps through a partnership with Spotlight Sports Group, selling model outputs that could be used to generate fan engagement products. Phillips arrived with a remit that drew on his previous experience at Genius Sports.
“When I joined, it was with a view to replicating what I’d been doing at Genius many years before, which was selling odds feeds into betting operators,” he explains. “It was quite similar to the time at Genius. We started building models for sportsbooks, then started serving the odds and then generating our own data. We’ve gone through that same iteration now.”
Sporting Risk’s starting point was Player Props, drawing on the granular player data already sitting within the business. “We could use the player action as the building block of betting product. Instead of thinking about the match and the teams, we’ve always had this really rich player data.”
The company had previously used that data in work with professional football clubs around player recruitment and performance evaluation. For sportsbooks, it allowed Sporting Risk to model individual player actions across areas such as passes, fouls, shots and other match statistics. Player markets have since grown across territories including the UK, Italy, Brazil and the US, alongside a broader shift in how supporters follow sport.
“The Instagram accounts of individual athletes can often have five times the number of followers as the actual club they play for,” says Phillips. “That’s becoming the way that people want to bet and that’s where we’re able to service different things.”
Beyond Player Props
Player Props were followed by Sporting Risk’s BetBuilder proposition, although Phillips says the company initially questioned whether it needed to compete in an area already served by a number of established suppliers. “We thought BetBuilder was quite saturated and people had solved that problem,” he says. Sporting Risk subsequently concluded there was still a considerable difference between the BetBuilder products available across the market. “When we can really show people what we’ve got, it’s up at the same standard as Flutter and bet365.”
Phillips points to the contribution BetBuilder makes to GGR at leading sportsbooks compared with operators where it may represent only a small percentage of betting activity. “They might say, ‘We’ve got our own BetBuilder, but it’s five per cent of the business. We don’t really see the value in over-investing in it. But if you did, you’re attracting a different segment of customer. Those customers view it more as entertainment – almost a mini-lottery type product. They’re happy to buy a ticket and win a bigger prize quite rarely.”
Sporting Risk is now developing products around that behaviour, including Same Game Pick ‘Em and FlexBuilder. Same Game Pick ‘Em reverses the conventional process of constructing a BetBuilder. Instead of choosing selections and seeing what price they collectively produce, the customer starts by deciding the type of return they want. “What do you want to get paid out?” explains Phillips. “Do you want to be paid 10x your stake? How many legs do you want in that BetBuilder?”
A player could request three selections for a 10x return, for example, and Sporting Risk generates combinations matching those requirements. Those combinations can be refreshed or further refined according to whether the customer wants player, team or match selections. “It comes at it from the reverse angle. You start with what you want and then we’re giving you the selections, rather than you trying to create the selections to arrive at what you want.”
Phillips doesn’t expect the format to appeal to every bettor. “If you’re the only operator who offers that, then you’ve potentially got a big niche. Anyone who’s using that product is a good customer from the operator perspective. If you can service and own a niche like that, then we think it could be very powerful.”
More ways for a bet to survive
FlexBuilder approaches BetBuilder from another direction. Rather than requiring every selection to land, the customer can choose how many legs are allowed to miss. The additional probability of winning is reflected in the potential return. Phillips says the concept emerged partly from operator feedback about customer frustration with near misses. “Then also if you take a first goalscorer or an under market in that BetBuilder, early on in the game you might see the whole thing crash out because you’ve got one selection wrong. The milestone markets are great because they are generally achievable for the full 90. This gives customers more scope to diversify what they combine and keep that entertainment factor.”
The format also allows customers to include selections they might otherwise consider too risky. A bettor could include two potential goalscorers, for example, while allowing one of those selections to miss. “It allows customers to cast the net a bit wider,” explains Phillips. Sporting Risk is developing further products around similar principles, including promotional mechanics that change the conditions under which a customer wins, loses or receives an early payout. The company has also continued to expand the underlying content available to operators.
Closing the product gap
Sporting Risk has added or expanded partnerships with operators including Midnite, Betfred, BoyleSports and Entain, while its relationship with Sportradar provides another route for its content into sportsbooks. Phillips attributes some of that momentum to the breadth of product Sporting Risk can now offer. “We’re in a position where we can go to operators and say, rather than just providing you with one piece of the puzzle, we can give you really everything you need to take you from a very basic football product up to Tier 1 level and beyond.”
The comparison Phillips regularly encounters is with the football products available from the largest operators. “A lot of smaller operators are saying, ‘We need to get there product-wise.’ Now we can say, with one additional supplier, we can give you almost everything that they have from a product perspective that’s giving them a delta against you.” This includes Player Props and BetBuilder alongside products such as early payout mechanics and a pipeline of new promotional features.
For Sporting Risk, having enough products to justify the technical work required by an operator has also become part of the sales proposition. “Integration is always the struggle. An operator might like a product you’ve got, but if there’s not a strong enough business case to do the integration, they’ll do something else with those developers for that period of time.”
The Sportradar relationship reduces that requirement for operators already connected to its infrastructure. “Sportradar has got integrations with almost every sportsbook on the planet, so they remove that barrier.” Phillips says that was particularly useful ahead of the World Cup when some operators were assessing the depth of their Player Prop offering. “They were able to turn to Sportradar and just turn it on in a few days, with a little work on their end to make sure it looked right on the front end. That’s great for us as a route to market.”
Finding something different
Sporting Risk’s development process increasingly involves creating products before taking them to operators for feedback. “We’re happy to create things and show them working,” says Phillips. “We’ve got a relatively good track record of picking concepts that resonate with operators and then they want to try them.” Others are dropped before reaching the market.
“We come up with concepts and put them in front of our clients. Some of them might say, ‘It won’t work for this reason,’ and then we scrap those. We’ve got a portfolio of things now where the concept has been validated by operators, and we’re bringing multiple things to market over the next six months.”
Phillips says Sporting Risk generally tries to develop around established customer behaviour rather than creating products that require bettors to learn an entirely unfamiliar way of wagering. “If you try to be too innovative in this industry and take things too far away from what exists, you can be too early and they don’t get traction with operators. It’s about spotting the trends and things that are working and then asking how we lean into that trend and make something that’s more interesting and provides differentiation.”
What the World Cup showed
The World Cup provided Sporting Risk with a larger test of its Player Prop and BetBuilder products. Phillips says the success of several leading goalscorers contributed to strong customer results in player markets. “A lot of customers did very well out of backing Haaland, Mbappe, Messi and Harry Kane. I think that’s going to give player markets a big boost going into the new season because people have had that experience of winning, or being very close to winning.”
For sportsbooks, concentrated betting around the same players and teams also demonstrated the value of spreading customer selections across a wider range of outcomes. “If everyone’s backing Mbappe to score two, France to win and over 2.5 goals in the game, you’re getting absolutely murdered. But if you’ve managed to persuade someone to get an extra leg in there – another player’s shots on target, assists or something else – and you’ve diversified what those additional legs are, then you’ve probably managed to hedge yourself far better.”
Phillips sees scope for Sporting Risk’s simulations to be used more directly in how operators construct and present pre-built bets. “We’ve got the BetBuilder, we can run the simulations and create these products, but we can also use those simulations to say, ‘This is the risk that we’ve got and this is the probability of this stuff coming in.’ Then what would be some other combinations that are less correlated with each other which we could start pushing out to people, so not all these bets are going to land at the same time?”
Betting beyond 90 minutes
Extra Time produced another set of findings during the World Cup. Sporting Risk had developed Extra Time Player Props before the tournament so operators could continue offering player markets if knockout matches went beyond 90 minutes.
“I wasn’t really sure if it would have huge value from a turnover perspective,” says Phillips. “We thought it would be great for operators to have something they could show that was unique to them because not many were really offering much in Extra Time.” The subsequent figures changed that assessment. “When we did the analysis after a few weeks, we could see that turnover in Extra Time was really high versus the rest of the game.”
Only a small number of tournament matches reached Extra Time, limiting the overall volume, but the customers who reached that stage of a match continued looking for betting opportunities. “The turnover shows that customers are voting for that feature. If people are voting for it, then it’s something that you should have. If somebody doesn’t get what they want at your sportsbook, they’re just that much more likely to go somewhere else.”
Phillips points to the number of sportsbook accounts held by many bettors and the ease with which customers move between operators. “When the offers dry up, how are you the operator with the main share of wallet that people go back to? That’s where the product has to stand for itself.”
Building promotion into the bet
Sporting Risk is also developing betting mechanics in which promotional features form part of the product itself. Phillips gives the example of a market asking which player will record the next shot on target. A customer backing the favourite could receive their stake back if the second favourite records the next shot instead. “There’s enough margin in that market that we can usually do that. It’s a nice bonus to have, but it doesn’t have to be a free bet. You can build those mechanics into the product itself.”
Another product in development takes the familiar early-payout concept and applies it to a goalscorer selection. A customer backing a team could also select the first goalscorer. If that player scores first, the bet pays immediately; if another player scores, the original team bet continues.
“You pay a little premium to have that, but it means customers can add these goalscorer markets without that high risk that if the guy doesn’t score, you’ve lost. You’re just not getting paid out early and you’ve still got your bet on the team until the end of the game.” Sporting Risk expects to bring several of these products to market over the coming six months.
Towards 2027
Phillips describes Sporting Risk’s forthcoming rebrand as more of a sharpening of its identity than a wholesale change. The company is also recruiting commercially and expanding a client base that now includes operators across the UK, Europe, US, Asia, Africa and LatAm.. Sporting Risk was predominantly known for Player Props during the first phase of Phillips’s time with the company. Its message to operators is now broader.
“We’re offering that capability to bring a sportsbook into a tier-one level product offering, and we’re trying to hit every touch point that the typical operator would need from a soccer and now basketball perspective to reach that. Now we’re pushing that out to say: what do these tier ones not have? What do we know works well for them, but could be better and could be more differentiated again?” This product development will continue alongside Sporting Risk’s work in data, modelling and simulations, with Phillips keen to keep the technology behind the proposition rather than make it the proposition itself. And this applies equally to AI.
“It’s a tool. It’s something we use internally to develop products, but it’s not the product. The product is what the customer gets. Just like if you’re talking about any piece of software, it might be how we make the product, but it’s not what the customer gets. We try to avoid making it front and centre of what we’re doing.”
For Sporting Risk, the focus heading into 2027 remains on what appears on the sportsbook – and what the customer can do with it.