In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Liggero, Chroma Sports commercial director Jon Trigg discusses what opportunities UK has in store for daily fantasy sports.
Daily fantasy sports has finally landed in the United Kingdom, but is it good for traditional sportsbooks operators or not?
Experts have already said there is “a bit of appetite” for daily fantasy sports among operators, particularly after DraftKings launched its long-awaited product, DraftKings.co.uk, last month.
For Jon Trigg, commercial director of Chroma Sports, the opportunity lies in the potential acquisition of the 5 to 7 million active fantasy game players in the country.
“[With] DraftKings coming in, [and] obviously Fanduel will be turning up pretty shortly, we’ll be sort of looking at actively acquiring customers through publishing deals, through deals with clubs and once they’ve got that education placed to those 5-7 million sort of fantasy game players, there’s a good percentage there which can be converted to be daily pay-to-play gamers,” Trigg told CalvinAyre.com.
DraftKings’s UK product is, essentially still not ready for prime time—sign-ups are currently available only via Android and iOS apps, with a desktop web option coming “very soon.” Still, DraftKings UK market might come as a threat to traditional sportsbook operators who are used to having the markets all to themselves.
Trigg, however, believes that DraftKings and Fanduel’s entry will “help grow the market,” because essentially, there are fantasy sports products existing in the UK market today.
“The key challenge they [sportsbooks] have is they don’t have the liquidity. It’s all about whoever’s got the biggest prizes, I think that’s going to be the key thing, but operators will enter [daily fantasy sports]. They’ll enter it purely as a way to protect their audience,” he explained. “Traditionally, fantasy sports has been used successfully as a customer acquisition and importantly as a customer engagement and re-engagement tool, but you know for an operator to run a DFS product it’s a way of them not losing their customers to Draftkings or Fanduel, and ultimately if that helps them sort of get that customer coming back on the site, more frequently cross promote other markets, then that’s what they’re going to be looking at doing.”
