Let’s find out what is currently the most popular – or gaining more and more popularity – sport for online betting. The data is based on the Betting Insider marketing agency.
Football rules
OK, the current global betting trends are: football today accounts for 44 percent of the world betting market, and cybersports have already surpassed MMA!
Football now takes almost half of the betting market, and tennis is a quarter of it. It is no secret that football is the world’s biggest betting sport; it is the most popular ball game in the world, and the most popular sport, in general. There’s a strong correlation between popularity and betting. We’ll get to it a bit later. The bottom line is that the football betting market is bigger than all other sports in total, except for tennis.
Tennis is # 2
Yes, tennis is firmly in second place in terms of player interest and volume of money bet. It’s easy to explain: in any bookie betting line, even on leisure days, you can find a couple of tennis matches. That’s why tennis betting represents 25.3 percent of the market, much more than basketball, volleyball, and ice hockey combined!
Have you heard about ping pong betting?
You’d be surprised, but table tennis (or ping pong) is at the top of sports betting! Young Asians bouncing around a small backyard party table, account for as much as 5.2 percent of all betting in the world. Once again, table tennis is loaded more often than volleyball (4.8 percent worldwide), and basketball is only a couple of percent ahead of it (7.7 percent of the market volume).
The rise of cybersports
Cybersports has finally ceased to be a niche fun for geeks; it is now at the top of the long-term global trends. However, bookies are only trying to make money from it by accepting not so many bets on cyber games. This leads to the fact that the cybersports betting market is growing a little slower than player contracts and tournament prize pools, it is only 1.5 percent of total betting so far. But, given the age of cybersports, and the fact that it only recently emerged from the underground, that ratio is still impressive.
The downfall of horse racing
Horse racing, the great-grandfather of all betting, is ending its days in a nursing home today. Only a tiny 0.03 percent of betting comes from this sport; this means that the once-great betting sport is just a shadow of what it had been.
Live betting is oh so trendy!
Another cool thing is the growth and total volume of live betting; it simply destroys traditional pre-match betting. For example, now tennis in-play bets account for as much as 84 percent of the total volume. Even in good old football, this number has reached 70 percent! In general, for all sports, in-play betting accounts for 76 percent of the total number of bets.
The conclusion: the popularity of a sport directly correlates with the volume of the betting market; a great example would be the table tennis phenomenon; it enjoys a huge audience in Asia so it is well ahead of various sports, like ice hockey, or volleyball, that is more widespread in the world. Still, lots of Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians plus other Asian nations just love it, and bet on it!