The new legal sports betting market in the United States has just experienced the busiest four-day stretch in history when the NFL season began.
GeoComply, a company that provides sports book geolocation services, tracked 58.2 million online transactions that took place Thursday through Sunday with sports books in 18 states and the District of Columbia. It meant a 126% increase over the same period at the start of the 2020 NFL season.
New Jersey had the highest volume of sportsbook transactions, followed by Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois, according to GeoComply data released Monday. Arizona launched its betting market Thursday, just hours before the Dallas Cowboys and Tampa Bay Buccaneers opened the 2021 NFL season. More than 271,000 newly created sports book accounts in Arizona were combined for more than 6.1 million transactions over the four days, according to GeoComply.
“The data tells a remarkable story about the growth of the industry in a short period of time,” GeoComply gaming director Lindsay Slader said in a statement announcing the data.
Authorized bookmakers now operate in 26 states and Washington, and more jurisdictions are expected to go online in the coming months and years.
“It’s probably going to be one of our biggest weekends in history,” DraftKings sports book director Johnny Avello told ESPN Sunday night. “All the numbers look very positive.”
PointsBet, an online sports betting company, also reported record interest in betting on both the number of bets and the amount it bet on the opening Sunday of the NFL.
However, the expansion of legal sports betting in the United States has not hurt Nevada bookmakers. John Murray, executive director of the SuperBook at Westgate Las Vegas, told ESPN that betting control this past weekend increased by about 20% compared to the same weekend last year.
“It was great to hear people here again on a full NFL Sunday,” Murray said. “Mobile betting dominates the landscape right now, but we loved seeing so many over-the-counter businesses in the SuperBook after falling in 2020 due to employment and pandemic restrictions.”
Jeff Stoneback, director of sports betting at BetMGM in Nevada, said control of college football betting is also growing, adding that his books took 50% more shares on the Saturday before Labor Day than the same weekend of 2019.
“It just grows, grows and grows. It’s amazing,” Stoneback said. “It’s all over the country now and there are constant ads to bet on. Everyone is much more exposed to it.”
Overall, sports books reported a winning Sunday as the NFL juniors won 11-4 against the spread with eight absolute upsets.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better day to start the season,” said Tom Gable, director of sports books at The Borgata in Atlantic City, New Jersey.