Betfair Exchange August Newsletter: Euro 2024 success and what's new for 2024/25 football season

• Euro 2024 a winner on Exchange as England fell short

• VAR improvements on Betfair for new football season

• New Betfair Exchange horse racing markets on the way

• Get a FREE bet every time your team scores a goal in August!

Euro 2024 on Betfair Exchange

England came agonisingly close yet again to ending their major tournament trophy drought as they suffered their second consecutive loss in a Euros final. Spain were the best team in the tournament, putting on fantastic displays and their young stars coming to the fore at vital moments.

The Betfair Exchange fared well when compared to Euro 2020 with overall volume across the tournament up 5%. The Spain v England final matched £75m across all markets; just shy of the 2020 final which matched £79m.

This week, the English Football League kicks-off on Friday 9th August with the Premier League and major European leagues starting the following weekend.

You will be able to read season previews from Betting.Betfair experts and get the best tips throughout 2024/25.

VAR improvements for 2024/25 football season

At Betfair, we are at the forefront of finding ways to improve our service in football and towards the end of the 23/24 season, we adapted the way we manage VAR reviews in order to ensure we are fair across the board.

We moved to utilising a 'possible VAR' signal we get from feed providers. It will encompass the full cycle from the incident in contention to the end of a VAR review. This has helped to cut down on instances where the start of a VAR review proves to be contentious.

Feed integration work

We have been hard at work integrating a new football feed. While this work has been ongoing, a number of games have been set on a 12 second bet delay to ensure they are settled fairly.

Once the integration work is complete, the current 12% of matches managed on a 12 second bet delay will decrease to 1%. This is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.

Player props betting enjoys increasing popularity

Football has been slowly increasing the amount of data available to the wider betting market with broadcasters and betting operators surfacing relevant stats to help inform decision making. XG has been used, along with data on passes, tackles, fouls and much more.

This has led to more interest in the player specific markets which continue to grow throughout the season. We are currently looking into how the Betfair Exchange can compete in this area by making the markets easier to navigate.

We currently have multiple selections in the markets for all potential players well before the team news is announced, so there is a lot of choice.

Here are suggestions from us and our customers about how we can improve customer experience in this area:

• Void all non-starters from kick off - this is something Sportsbook currently uses but not the Exchange
• Limit the number of options by using 'Any other' as a selection.
• Group players by positions (as stated by Opta)
• Set the market live one hour before kick-off when team news is announced

New Betfair Exchange Horse Racing markets

Betfair Australia have continued their expansion in Horse Racing after the 100k new markets they added last year, by introducing a "cash back 2nd" market where they simply void second place.

This is a separate market which is loaded closer to the race's start time and early adoption has been positive. Betfair Australia have since rolled this option out across Greyhounds.

We are currently looking into replicating this for UK Horse Racing.

Tennis Feed Integration work complete

Due to a transfer of ATP tennis data ownership in January of this year, we unfortunately had to switch off the live scores API feed for ATP and Challenger tennis. We started an integration period straight away and after some positive testing in recent weeks we have been able to reinstate this and complete the work required.

All ATP and Challenger tennis scores feeds are now available via the API.

Now read Betting.Betfair for tips and previews from experts in major sports