In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Liggero, KMI Gaming’s Keith McDonnell talks about an innovative football betting product—Football Index.
Head’s up sports fans, there’s now a stock market for football.
Keith McDonnell, of KMI Gaming, said Football Index is “the world’s first football stock market,” where people can buy and sell shares in football players around the world using real money.
“It’s based on typical stock market functionality,” McDonnell told CalvinAyre.com. “You buy shares in players, you build your portfolio, you earn dividends at the end of the day if your player finishes the top of the chart, and you can cash in. It’s based on simple stock market principles of buy low and sell high.”
Football Index, McDonnell said, “fits nicely” between in-play sports betting and traditional season-long fantasy. The difference is that KMI Gaming has its own algorithm that looks into each player’s statistics.
“We have an in-house built algorithm that looks at things players do on the pitch but also off the pitch. Now, I think that’s the critical difference [between] it and a traditional sports betting product, right?” he explained. “Players, they may be in the news because they’re getting married or getting their first 100 cap for England or whatever, and that all adds to their value. Then of course, we have supply and demand, right? So if you have more people looking to buy a stock or share in a player, that increases the value.”
However, McDonnell noted that Football Index is different from sports betting.
“With betting, your stake can be dead within a minute, particularly with the growth of in-play. With this, your stake is never really dead until you cash out. It might increase in value, it might decrease in value, but you have a live portfolio that’s worth something. So there’s a reason every day to go in and check how much your portfolio is worth,” he said.
Currently, Football Index is offered only via The Mirror, but McDonnell said they’re not closing the doors on offering a white label solution in the future.
“We’re not discounting it,” he said. “Right now, we do have the partnership with The Mirror and a few other media partners—Yahoo, City AM—[but] we haven’t gone live with those yet officially or aggressively. We think we’re going to get quite a lot of interest and liquidity by doing it as a B2C, but if there’s partners out there interested in Football Index and they want a white label solution, we’ll talk to them.”
