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70,000 Bets a Minute: How FanDuel’s Parent Is Winning at Sports Gambling
Sun, 11 May 2025
This week, we’re bringing you an episode of Bold Names, which presents conversations with the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. On this episode, hosts Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims speak to Peter Jackson, the CEO of Flutter Entertainment, who leads a global sports betting empire. With the U.S.-based FanDuel as its crown jewel, he has a prime view of one of the fastest-growing and most profitable entertainment industries in the world. How is Flutter using technology to supercharge sports betting, while grappling with its potential harms? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the key trends in the online betting industry?
During this year's Super Bowl, gambling company FanDuel was winning big, 70,000 bets a minute big. And today we're bringing you Tim and Christopher's conversation with Peter Jackson, the CEO of FanDuel's parent company, Flutter. What does the man at the top have to say about one of the most profitable entertainment industries in the world and how technology is supercharging it?
Tim, I think this week's episode is one of the most interesting we've done yet. And tons of new listeners are going to tune in for the first time ever. Oh, yeah? Want to bet? Funny you should mention. This week's guest is the CEO of the company behind FanDuel, the biggest U.S. company in sports betting by revenue. Even if you don't care about sports, his industry is transforming the U.S.
Chapter 2: How did FanDuel achieve 70,000 bets a minute?
Right. It was estimated that Americans would wager roughly $1.4 billion on the Super Bowl this year. And he told us FanDuel customers made about 70,000 bets a minute during the big game. The sports betting industry is big, and it's growing like crazy.
And so are the consequences of getting millions of Americans hooked on gambling anytime, anywhere. That's next. For a lot of the companies we cover, first quarter is a bit of a lull. But if you're a gambler, there's no better time of the year. And if you're a sports betting company, it's also one of the busiest times of the year.
The American Gaming Association estimated that Americans wagered about $1.4 billion on the Super Bowl this year. And then there was March Madness, which was twice that, $3.1 billion. There are a lot of different things to bet on these days, and making sure the house always wins is a huge technological problem for online sports betting giant Flutter and its CEO, Peter Jackson.
You think about like the Super Bowl with all those different players and all the different stats available. We have to be constantly assessing what we think the probabilities are of events happening. And then we turn those probabilities into prices, have them available on our site.
And at peak, you know, 70,000 bets a minute coming through the platform with, you know, you can imagine millions of customers looking and assessing prices in between that as well.
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Chapter 3: What role does technology play in sports betting?
The stock market has been all over the place since January. But in recent years, FanDuel's parent company, Flutter, has performed more like a tech company. There's some irony in the fact that the best way to make money on FanDuel might be to skip the app and buy the stock.
I've been absolutely delighted with the way that the team have built the business in the US with Fanjul. And if you look at the projections, we actually are talking about a $70 billion total addressable market in the medium term across the US and Canada.
The story of Flutter is the story of a whole new multi-billion dollar vice coming out of the bookie's notebook and into a place where it can be taxed and regulated. And no one has a better understanding of the odds of what's coming next than Jackson. From The Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins.
Chapter 4: How is Flutter Entertainment positioned in the market?
And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, how is Flutter capitalizing on the rapid rise of legalized online gambling in the U.S.? Is the sports betting boom sustainable? And is it really all just good, clean fun? Or are states opening the gates to potential harms?
Peter, welcome to the show. Good to have you here. I'm sure our listeners have at least a passing familiarity with your best-known brand in the U.S., FanDuel, and its competitor, of course, DraftKings. But for those of you who aren't already wagering on sports in the U.S., let's start with introducing your company and what you do.
Yes, I run a business called Flutter, which if you're English, you immediately know what that is because it means having a bet. And if you're American, you've got no idea what we're talking about. But we're the world's largest sports betting and gaming business. Flutter Entertainment, we're listed on the New York Stock Exchange. You're right, Chris, we own Fangio.
So it's an important part of our portfolio. It's about half of our revenues. The other half of our revenues come from our businesses outside of Fangio.
And you know, you're kind of on a tear. Like you've been posting really strong results. And you're also growing. You've got 44% of the take for sportsbook revenue in the US. Goldman Sachs estimates Americans will spend $45 billion a year on sports betting once the market is mature. It's already a $10 billion a year market right now. So let's start with that. Do you really think...
that you're on pace to grow 350% in the next, I don't know, 10, 20 years?
When we acquired Fangio, we were anticipating that we'd be one of the market-leading businesses, and we'd be expecting that the market would be enormous. I've been absolutely delighted with the way that the team have built the business in the U.S. with Fangio.
And if you look at the projections, we actually are talking about a $70 billion total addressable market, or TAM, as people would say, in the medium term across the US and Canada. So we think the business will be bigger. That covers both sports betting and iGaming. Look, all of us who spend time in America cannot help but realize how passionate people are about sports. Everybody watches it.
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Chapter 5: What is the future outlook for the sports betting market?
Everyone knows a score. They all know what happened to the players. You had a good game, a bad game. A whole piece around fandom is so important. And we deliver a brilliant experience for customers. We own the parlay concept, this idea that people can pull together a series of events that are related in a game, and they can place a bet on it.
So what would be an example of that? The Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes is going to do a touchdown and then he's going to have a dance afterwards and people can bet on that?
Or how does that work? I'm sure that will be available somewhere on our platform. about picking it's about picking that you know Patrick Mahomes will score a touchdown there's going to be a field kick from both teams in both halves that Saquon Barkley is also going to score a touchdown and that the Eagles are going to win by 10 points
Right. I think that's a big thing.
You could combine all that together.
The technology has allowed for all sorts of bets, right? It's no longer just which team is going to win or are they going to cover the spread. You can get very granular in the whole game. I mean, this is... incredibly deep. But I think it also kind of rises with analytics and sports and this kind of bigger conversation about kind of the future of television, right?
You have the FanDuel Sports Network, which I think costs something like 20 bucks a month. And here in the US, you can get MLB, NHL and NBA games, which seems like a really great deal. Is that part of the future of your business, television streaming?
We've always been in the sports broadcasting business in America. So our first investment there, we bought a business called TVG. So some people wouldn't think about it as sports, but horse racing is very popular. And of course, we made the leap to streaming it as well. So we started with two horse racing channels and we built it out from there.
Now, of course, there's a huge amount of technology that we have to have behind the scenes to price all of these events and markets and selections. What do we mean by pricing it? Can you think about the Super Bowl with all those different players and all the different stats available? We have to be constantly assessing what we think the probabilities are of events happening.
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Chapter 6: How does Flutter create engaging user experiences?
Yeah, absolutely right, Tim. We are a technology business. We're delivering a brilliant user experience to our customers. But if you think about the amount of things we sell on our platform, we've almost got a limitless assortment. So trying to work out how you merchandise all of those different products to customers and make them available is
Because ultimately, you know, people want to watch the game, but they want to get their bet on quickly. And, you know, and that's not to get in the way. Right. But maybe they want to do a bit of research along the way.
So, yeah, we those those types of products where people can spend time looking at what other people are betting on or looking into the history of what's happened to the matchup between two players. That's an important component.
Actually, even simple things like making sure that if people have got a bet on, they could actually track the performance of their bets in the game without having to keep going onto their phone. So making sure that we're taking advantage of the latest features on the Apple iOS, for example. But that slider component, it's simple and elegant.
So a customer can select the number of yards they want to pick for a player. You think about it, every yard you increase or decrease, we have to go back and we have to determine what we think the probability is of that event happening. And it's happening real time, right? You know, real time, whilst the game is happening, right? We're constantly assessing all of those probabilities.
But we also spend a lot of time talking to our customers and finding out what they want. and thinking about how we can bring that to life for them. And the scale that we have, the data, the insights allows us to do that.
We just heard how Flutter uses tech to create new experiences for its customers. But how much of that tech is also used to keep them clicking, scrolling, and betting? Just like social media keeps us glued to our phones.
In the end, this is about entertainment. This is not about making a living for them. You get much better value from the money you're spending with us than you do going to the cinema. Stay with us.
Clearly, like you just said, the data matters. Of course, you are a business, right? I mean, according to our own reporting, I think people lose on average seven and a half cents on every dollar they bet with you, right? The house always wins. But how do you keep people coming back when, on average, you have the problem that every gaming business has, which is that...
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Chapter 7: What are the entertainment aspects of betting?
Right. And sports betting is legal in 39 states now already.
Yeah, the first state we went live in was in Jersey. And actually, you could cross the bridge between New Jersey and Manhattan, and as soon as you were a meter past the halfway point, your phone would stop working on our app. So we had to have absolutely pinpoint precise precision to know exactly where you were, so that we were very careful to ring fence people from a geographical perspective.
Likewise, we do very, very careful and precise customer onboarding and verification to make sure that you are who you say you are and you therefore are old enough to be able to gamble with us depending on what the state's rules and regulations are. So we're not as a platform where you can just tick a button and say, I'm over 21, let me on.
We need to see all your verification details and documents before we'll let you onboard onto our platform.
That said, plenty of teens have said it's easy to circumvent those age verification controls. I mean, it wasn't hard to find op-eds in university newspapers that are talking about teens with problem gambling issues, especially on college campuses. For example, Purdue University has tried to ban everybody on campus from doing this kind of gambling.
It does kind of feel like your business, though, to get people on as soon as you can. And that does feel like the playbook of some other businesses in the past, I could name. So how important to your growth is getting people as soon as they're able to get on your app?
We take this stuff incredibly seriously, Chris. So, you know, if there are examples where, you know, people think they can get through our systems, we will shut that stuff down. Now, there are a lot of illegal operators in the US. You know, people are spending a lot of money, you know, with unregulated sites. So, you know, I agree, you know,
Around the world, no underage people should be allowed anywhere near our platforms or any of our regulated competitors. And actually, we should all be doing as much as we can from the regulators, the banks. The internet companies who allow the advertising, right? You know, they shouldn't be allowing these illegal sites to advertise. There's lots that can be done.
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Chapter 8: How do social media trends influence betting behavior?
The regulators are much more interventionalist in the UK in a number of different fields. And so in the gambling space, they have determined that they want to try and ensure that customers don't spend more money than they can afford. And that's quite interesting. So moral question, right, which is what is more than people can afford, right? So where do you draw the line on that for people?
There's a tool that we have available in the States at the moment, spending tools to make sure that people are aware of how much money they're spending on our site. Because look, it is entertainment. They are spending money with us and we need to make sure it's clear to them how much we're spending. The other thing that we've developed in Australia actually is a real-time intervention tool.
So, you know, Chris, if I can see that traditionally you're spending, you know, a hundred bucks a week with us, but when the Superbowl comes around, you spend $400, we think, well, that's your normal pattern, right? And then if the following year, we suddenly see you spending $200 in one day and trying to spend $300 the next day, We'll intervene and we'll say, are you sure you want to do this?
Because this seems outside of what you would normally do with this, your normal pattern of behavior. So we're developing some real-time intervention tools to help ensure that we can just turn the mirror and point to our customer and just say, just have a think about whether you want to do what you're about to do.
I guess I'd be curious in hearing more about that because one of the criticisms about online gaming is that it's taking too many cues from social media and so-called dark patterns, that idea that kind of keeps people engaged. I read something from a researcher that talked about how these features keep the product exciting, engaging, and engaging. And you make them almost addictive.
So on one hand, you've got a product that is almost tweaked in a way to keep people going back for it. And the other hand, you've got some tools, presumably, that can try to mitigate some of that. So where are you in that kind of debate or kind of that challenge?
The whole field of safer gaming is really important to us. Research, education, internally in our business on it. And we spend a lot of time with our customers with these types of tools that I was describing, making sure that we push this really hard. So there are many customers who we block from our systems because we're not comfortable that they're gaming responsibly.
It's then important that you actually have a tool available in the country so that if the customer wants to self-exclude, they can do it from all operators. So, you know, there's plenty of revenues that we don't take, right?
There's customers that we switch off or we restrict the amount of money that they're spending with us to make sure that they stay at a level which they are comfortable with hindsight to ensure that they're engaging with us safely and responsibly. It's absolutely crucial. It's part of our societal license.
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