Betfair Exchange January Newsletter: What's ahead for 2026

• Football passive bet delay scales up

• Dynamic bet delay testing restarts

• Football player markets removed from top tier competitions

• A record year for Exchange availability

Welcome to 2026 and the January edition of Exchange News

A new year brings a packed sporting calendar and plenty of Exchange activity to look forward to. From the Australian Open already setting the tone early in the year, to the return of major annual racing highlights the Cheltenham Festival and Grand National. There are also two World Cups to come in 2026 - the T20 Cricket World Cup in India & Sri Lanka followed later in the year by the biggest global sporting event in the calendar as the FIFA World Cup kicks off across the USA, Canada and Mexico. As always, we'll be here to keep you up to date with the latest Exchange developments, product updates and insights for 2026.

No delays on passive Bets scaling up in Football 

Towards the end of last year, we integrated the no delay on passive bets tool into the first Football markets to begin testing. This was off the back of a successful full launch of the tool across five other sports on the Exchange - Tennis, American Football, Basketball, Baseball, and Darts. Tennis was the first to go to full coverage and had a strong year on the Exchange, results showed volume was +12% vs 2024, showing the impact of passive bet delays.  

As a reminder, no delays on passive bets means that a bet will instantly skip the bet delay if it is not going to get matched.  

The top two Saudi leagues, and all professional Scottish Leagues were the first competitions added in January for testing, with further leagues being added at the end of the month and into February.  

Below are the current listed competitions with respective competition IDs that are subject to the passive bet delay logic.  

These competitions will remain part of testing indefinitely and only matches with Odd-numbered event IDs will be subject to the passive bet delay tool until further notice. All competitions across all sports with the passive bet delay logic are listed through the API, see betDelayModelsfor for more details. 

Dynamic delay testing in Tennis restarted in January 

The next phase of testing for optimising bet delays also recommenced in January, where we tested dynamic delays on some Tennis Challenger events. This is the concept whereby bet delays are reduced to one second during safe periods so in the case of tennis, during change of ends. Full details of the logic can be found on the Betfair Developer Forum. 

The first tests done this year were on an ATP Challenger Oeiras event, with more testing to follow over the coming months. We will continue to communicate relevant Tournament and Event IDs that will be subject to this testing whilst the number of test markets is small. You'll again be able to make use of the recent bet Delay Models release communicated in December to show which events have bet delays applied, please let us know if you spot any issues with this. 
 
Equally, we are still open to any general feedback on the concept of dynamic delays. While this remains an experiment, it may come into play for other sports in the future. For example - Football at half time.

Player markets consolidation for top tier football

Following a review of our player market offering, we will be making updates to our Grade 1 football markets, effective from Friday 30 January. 

The following markets will be removed from the Grade 1 offering: 
- Player Anytime Assist 
- Player to Commit 1 or More Fouls 
- Player to Commit 2 or More Fouls 
- Match Shots 
- Match Shots on Target 

In addition, the following competitions will move to the new Grade 1 template, with Team News voids applied to all matches: 
- Premier League 
- La Liga 
- UEFA Champions League (from the knockout rounds) 

Please note any non-starters will be voided in these leagues going forward.

Engineering Excellence: The five-year availability journey 

Whilst we are excited for the year ahead, it's also worth looking back at last year's achievements. Exchange stability and performance were a focus again for 2025, building on the success of the previous years. Betfair Exchange had the most stable Spring Racing, the best IPL ever and a solid start to the Premier League, despite being the busiest start of season ever recorded. For the first time ever, we recorded the best in class "four-nines" availability uptime at end of year. Figures shown below outline improvements over the years, most notably delivering strong availability uptime of 99.997% for 2025. 

Over the last five years, the Exchange has transitioned from a period of notable instability to high reliability. This turnaround reflects a significant reduction in downtime and a vastly improved user experience during peak loads.  

Availability against total outages rose from 99.835% in 2021, while availability during high-traffic windows saw substantial growth, climbing from 99.673% to 99.968% in the same period, ensuring the product remains stable when it is needed the most.  

This has been the result of sustained efforts and fine-tuning by engineering teams on multiple fronts. Simplifying the Bet Placement path, rebuilding Stream API infrastructure and modernising some of the core areas of Exchange have all had a strong impact in this transformation.  

Thanks to stability and performance improvements, we have been able to implement other sought after platform features, including the smooth roll out of passive bet delays across 2025. 

While we have come far from the days where stability was a major issue for the Exchange, there are still areas built on legacy technology so more to do in 2026. Our focus will remain on building on this foundation and ensuring we have 99.99% availability across a very busy sporting calendar and continue delivering meaningful product enhancements and improvements. 

All Exchange newsletters and updates from 2025 can be found in the Exchange News archive on betting.betfair.com, where past editions and announcements remain available.