Coming out of lockdown restrictions, many sectors of the world economy are seeing supercharged demand. This is a mixture of consumers’ habits and money which were not able to be exercised or spent throughout the pandemic and instead had been postponed to when the economy started improving and opening back up.
One example can be the sports industry, where live sports events had been cancelled or postponed during the pandemic and, alongside live football or basketball matches, the live sport gambling component of the betting and gambling industry had lost of a lot of business – as there were no games to bet on! However, now that the Olympics, Euro 2020 and domestic sports leagues have begun taking place again, has there been a strong increase in demand for live sport gambling?
The covid-19 pandemic had delivered a serious streak of bad luck to casinos, both traditional and online, in the area of live sport gambling. For example, in the UK, in March 2020 the gross gambling yield on events betting was nearly 161 million GBP. However, in April this had plummeted to just 62 million GBP. In just one month, over 100 million GBP of gross gambling revenues had vanished, as there were fewer events on which players could bet. Moreover, Find Betting Sites suggests that this money had not really gone elsewhere in the gambling industry, like into other games or bets, but had instead just not been spent by gamblers and bettors in general.
Potentially, this has been money that gamblers and bettors have been sitting on throughout the pandemic if they had not spent it on any other gambling or betting games, such that this kind of ‘supercharged demand’ we had mentioned would be seen coming out of the pandemic in the form of a large increase in gross gambling yields on events betting, following a year of slow sports headlines.
This is exactly what we had observed. Later in June even, when the majority of sports resumed, especially the English Premier League, the gross gambling yield had ballooned to around 217 million GBP. Although the gross revenues of the gambling industry in the UK has seen its ups and downs over the past year, the recovery has been quite strong and sustained. For example, the average monthly gross gambling yield throughout the first lockdown was around 108 million GBP, however, in the period of May 2021, this gross gambling yield figure reached 241 million GBP.
The gross gambling yield figure for May 2021 was literally double its average value throughout the first lockdown, and much higher than the pursuing months that Britain also spent in lockdown. Overall, this supercharged demand has been seen in the high gross gambling yield in the months following Britain’s first lockdown as well as the months on the ‘Road to Recovery’ from the coronavirus pandemic, where Britain had been slowly but surely opening its economy back up, with lockdown restrictions easing.
The period of supercharged demand in the gambling and betting industry is indicative of the fact that, when the gambling industry suffered major gross revenue losses in the first lockdown, those bets and wagers were money that had stayed in the pockets of punters, instead of having been spent on other gambling games or other sectors of the (closed) economy. This supercharged demand in the industry has gone through until the latest figures in the middle of 2021, but whether or not these are new habits formed by gamblers, and large gross gambling yield is here to stay is still unknown.
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