Unless you're a sports bettor in North Carolina, where college basketball is king, the most common refrain you're likely to hear out of a state gambling agency as it nears legal liftoff is, “our goal is to launch sports betting by the start of NFL season” — or maybe the Super Bowl.
But while those are noble and potentially lucrative objectives, new data from GambleID shows that they're not a be-all, end-all for either a state that's vying to launch or a sports betting operator looking to make a post-launch entry.
During a Tuesday webinar on the state of U.S. sports betting, GambleID President & Founder JD Garner shared a slide of the 10 most popular deposit days in 2023 among the betting apps his company serves. September 7, the Thursday night opener for the 2023-2024 season, ranked second, which is consistent with what common sense might dictate.
What's Number One?
So Super Bowl Sunday had to be first, right? Wrong – so wrong. It ranked as only the 17th largest deposit day of the year. Numero uno? That was Oct. 15, a Sunday on which 13 games were played — 38 days after the start of the NFL season.
Rounding out the top 10 were Thanksgiving and a bunch of random dates during the regular season, with no postseason dates making the cut. So while the symmetry involved in a launch at the very beginning of football season might be nice, it “is not the end of the line,” said Garner.
The full results of a bettor survey and report that GambleID has produced in collaboration with Betsson and Sports Handle will be released in the coming weeks.