World Cup isn't going American on the pitch. The betting market already did

Since kick-off, I have watched the same debate you have: air-conditioned stadiums, celebrities in the stands, the fear of football turned into American-style entertainment. And the perfect symbol: the cooling break in the middle of each half, which FIFA has opened up to advertising. A slot that never existed in football is worth an estimated $500 to $600 million for broadcasters over the tournament. The TV timeout has also entered the game.

But even that is the tree hiding the forest. Compare $600 million in advertising against $60 billion in bets: the real Americanisation is not happening on your screens; it has already happened in the books. It is measurable, and it is massive. Football has just entered the business model of American sports. Not entirely through the show, but through betting.

Broken records not only in the books

Let's start with the facts. In New York, over the week ending 28 June, online operators took $512.5 million in handle, up 46.6% year on year per regulator data. Gross revenue reached $61.8 million at a 12.1% hold, making it the state's most profitable week in two months. In midsummer, with no NFL or NBA.

On the operator side, DraftKings reports handle running five times higher than at the same stage of the 2022 World Cup. The opening matches of the United States and Brazil became the two most-bet football games in FanDuel’s history, and Flutter estimates 10 million customers will have bet on the tournament across its platforms, with peaks of 100,000 bets per minute. Globally, H2 Gambling Capital projects $60 billion in regulated handle, which is 71% higher than Qatar's.

But the number that tells the whole story is a quieter one: $2.9 billion was expected in the US over one month of the tournament, while all football events generated $1.3 billion there across the entire summer of 2025. One World Cup weighs more than double a full summer of football. That is ceiling-breaking.

I can see it in our own dashboards too. ToffeeWeb, our UK media site, has quadrupled its traffic since the tournament began. The Playoffs, our international media brand, is up everywhere at once, especially across LatAm. Netflu, one of the most visited sports sites in Brazil, is breaking its social media records. The signal that struck me most comes from Italy – no qualified team, yet traffic and player acquisition are growing. All in, we estimate the World Cup is doubling our June-July revenue. That is a tide, not just a spike. 

A Super Bowl-calibre event

Put those numbers next to the two institutions of American betting. Super Bowl LX brought roughly $1.7 billion in legal handle. March Madness was expected to yield just over $3 billion. The World Cup, on the other hand, is anticipated to achieve between $2.82 and $4.4 billion according to Eilers & Krejcik, if Team US keeps going. Matt Bakowicz of American University estimates that a US quarter-final alone could generate 80% of a typical Super Bowl’s handle.

Two things have changed since Qatar. First, the infrastructure: sports betting is now legal in 39 states plus Washington, DC, and around 30 of them allow mobile betting. Second, the behaviour: team US matches generated up to nine times more betting than other games played on the same day, and more than 80% of the moneyline handle on US vs Belgium sat on the American win. That is the fuel of US sports betting: you don’t bet on a sport, you bet on your team. Football has just earned that status.

An acquisition machine

The most interesting part is not in the press releases, it is in the earnings calls. In Q1, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said he had “very high expectations for World Cup when it comes to customer acquisition and engagement”. On revenue, though, he remained cautious, since a World Cup offers fewer games than an NFL season. Translating into strategy, this means nobody is counting on July to make the year. July is for filling the CRM.

The details prove it. DraftKings pushed its World Cup marketing into California, Texas and Florida – three states where betting is illegal. You don’t spend there for July volume, you build a brand ahead of legalisation. The app also launched in Spanish just before the tournament, going after an audience the American sportsbook had never addressed. Flutter is speaking exactly the same language, ranking the World Cup among its two major conviction investments of 2026, alongside Brazil.

Why spend so much effort on one month of competition? Because the whole model rests on customer lifetime value, and retention is the real battlefield. During the 2022 World Cup, existing customers represented 82-86% of all active bettors in every phase of the tournament and outspent newly acquired bettors by up to 2.2x, according to Optimove. 

The World Cup is just the ticket in. The real competition starts in August, turning the casual Team US bettor into an NFL, NBA and casino customer.

Where the market doesn't exist, the money bets anyway

On 29 June, I watched the Netherlands vs Morocco in the middle of the night, like the entire Moroccan diaspora. Kick-off at 3 am and penalties around 6 am, thousands of people went to work without sleep. 

Morocco, my home country, has become a force in world football. Every Atlas Lions match triggers exactly the same reflex as a Team US match: you bet on your team.

Except that in Morocco, the iGaming market is not regulated. Offshore platforms attract around 10 times as many visitors as all legal operators combined, according to the Royal Institute of Strategic Studies (IRES). Public operator puts illegal betting at 3.5 billion dirhams for 2024 alone. A blocking order against offshore sites issued in January was suspended on appeal a month later.

In the middle of a World Cup, everything remains accessible. While the country wins on the pitch, its stakes flow offshore, often in crypto, without a dirham for local sport. Brazil made the opposite choice by regulating in early 2025, bringing in 79 licensed operators and around BRL 10 billion in tax revenue in year one. Same demand, two frameworks. Regulation does not kill a market; it decides who cashes it.

So, is this World Cup Americanising football? On the pitch, debate all you want. In the markets, it is done: a niche sport turned into a Super Bowl-calibre event, operators sacrificing a quarter of profitability to acquire customers, worldwide demand spilling into unregulated markets. 

For operators and affiliates, this summer’s question fits in one sentence: not how many accounts you opened in June, but how many you will reopen in October.

Football did not go American just on the pitch. It went American in the books in one month. And it is not coming back.