Kambi World Cup Insights: Stepping up the sportsbook product to win in extra-time and penalties

A tournament of 32 teams has now been whittled down to just eight, with the quarter-finals of the 2022 World Cup set to get underway today. This iteration of the World Cup has thrown up its fair share of talking points, controversies and surprises, but it is always the knockout stages when the real excitement begins. Everything is on the line as each team fights to make it through to the next round and avoid heading home, while anxious fans are also faced with the prospect of having to endure a nail-biting aspect of the game that is synonymous with the FIFA World Cup: extra -time and penalties.

We have already witnessed extra -time and penalties on two occasions at Qatar 2022 in the round of 16 with Morocco’s shock 3-0 victory on penalties over Spain and Croatia’s win against Japan. From a sports betting perspective, extra -time and penalties are a unique opportunity to drive renewed betting activity, and the ability to provide bettors with a compelling offering during such key moments of the game is crucial for keeping them engaged throughout.

However, utilising these opportunities is no easy task. Take extra- time as an example. At the end of 90 minutes, Kambi must simultaneously settle hundreds of thousands of pre-match and live bets from normal time whilst also managing a heavy spike in new betting activity. In such circumstances, only those sportsbooks with the necessary level of trading expertise and high-performance technology capable of managing such activity without hindering the user experience will succeed.
As you can see from the graph below, bet volume between full-time and extra-time on the Kambi network during the Morocco versus Spain encounter on Tuesday was one of the highest across the whole match. It was a similar story in the Japan versus Croatia match too.

Even more notable, however, is the spike at the end of extra time and during the penalty shoot-out, which was the highest of any point throughout the duration of the match. Many sportsbooks have opted not to invest and improve their offering specifically for such circumstances as extra -time and penalty shoot-outs don’t occur very often. However, with the match at its most intense during this period, our data shows that bettors want to bet when the game is most on the line and can go either way, underlining the importance of offering bettors a meaningful way to engage with every aspect of the match from the first to last kick that will aid in the retention of those bettors in the long -run.

We saw similar trends to this during Euro 2020. Games that went to penalties during the tournament saw a greater percentage of bets taken during extra time than in the first or second halves of normal time, for example, while, on average, 14% of bets taken when the game went the distance, occurred during penalty shoot-outs.

However, the popularity of penalty shoot-out betting among sports bettors seems to have really kicked on during the 2022 World Cup. Looking at the Spain versus Morocco match once more, the ‘outcome of next penalty’ market, which is unique to Kambi, was the fourth most- popular live bet offer on the network during the game and is an offer only made possible through a blend of automation and human expertise. The penalty offering was even ahead of the typically popular live offers such as ‘total goals’ and ‘total corners’, and joined by other dedicated markets for penalties such as ‘home/away team to score penalty’, ‘correct score – penalty shoot-out’ and ‘total penalties converted in penalty shoot-out’.

With eight games still left to play during the World Cup, penalty shoot-outs may have an important role to play in deciding which team lifts the trophy. We look forward to sharing further insights when we provide our overall reflections at the end of the competition.

Jonathon Hurst joined Kambi as a live trader in 2014 having previously worked within the trading team of UK bookmaker Ladbrokes. In 2017 he became head of live football at Kambi, a role he held for more than two years before being promoted to his current role as head of soccer in which he is responsible for Kambi’s soccer trading function.