By Edward Otsason 
Hot on the heels of winning Live Betting Product of the Year at the 2023 SBC Awards, Edward Otsason, Football Trading Desk Manager at Genius Sports takes us behind the scenes of Genius’ award-winning trading floor during a busy weekend of European football.
When managing trading for over 220 sportsbook operators, there are many factors we must balance. A busy weekend of Premier League football is a major operation. Add in La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and dozens of other sports and leagues and on a typical Saturday at least 50 of our football traders are monitoring and updating prices at any given time.
Inside a 24/7 trading operation
The entire Genius Sports trading function houses 500 traders, based across Europe and the Americas and is supported by a customer support team of over 100. This means we can offer 24/7 live event coverage. And with almost every operator requiring a localised trading strategy, we help our clients to customise pricing settings via our trading software, including overrounds, content scheduling and odds ladders.
As a trading partner, our role is to trade the true price – the exact probability of an outcome occurring – across thousands of in-play markets while giving our customers the flexibility they need. Whether that’s lowering margin on a certain market-type to offer the most competitive odds in their region or extremely aggressive suspension settings with zero downtime.
On the trading floor
A weekend of live football starts with allocating fixtures, usually beginning on Thursday. Each trader is given at least 48 hours to research and analyse their fixtures – and we’re also available through the week to align with our customer’s trading teams. Prior to kick-off, our traders assess the market, set up any extra side or fast markets for their fixtures and configure expectations for their game. All of this is done in close communication with operators to factor in local market dynamics.
If a customer has a particularly major fixture or gameweek in their region, we’ll consult on how they can tailor trading settings to suit their local audience. Many of our customers also trust our risk team to manage player profiling and bet acceptance.
On our trading floor, we specialise by sport. More than 70 traders sit on our football trading desk and another 60 focus on U.S. sports such as basketball and NFL. We’ve built our own proprietary trading models and at the same time our traders monitor low-latency live data feeds to ensure fast, reliable updates and lower market suspension times. We average an industry-best 99% live market uptime on major football.
Once a game has started, a key priority is to then ensure our football model constantly offers the correct price across every market and the entirety of the fixture. Our odds markets automatically update throughout the game but, uniquely, our pricing algorithms leverage machine learning to instantly and accurately update odds during key betting intervals, like when a goal is scored, a penalty is awarded, or during a corner or booking offence, with zero downtime. These are often the most exciting moments for people to place bets and therefore bet delays and suspensions can be damaging for our customers’ turnover.
A partnership approach
Working closely with each customer to get the right approach for their target audience is key to how we operate. In the early weeks of this domestic European season, we’re seeing increasing numbers of sportsbooks work with our traders to customise trading settings so they can offer odds boosts and low-margin odds in the most efficient way.
As an example, last month we consulted with an operator who had not been utilising the flexible danger state settings on our console to the full potential. In the early weeks of the season, they felt hamstrung by high suspension rates but after an adjustment within our trading software, saw an immediate spike in uptime and in-play turnover in the games thereafter.
For years, operators had to suspend markets when goals were scored or penalties were awarded in order to readjust. Our AI football modelling capabilities are a step forward on this front because they factor in millions of historical datasets to eliminate disruption to the in-play football experience, without compromising price accuracy.
If you’re looking to improve your trading performance or simply grow margins or turnover, then feel free to reach out to one of the Genius team or message me directly. We recently added even more official European and South American football content, so whatever league you’re looking at, we can help.
Want to find out more about our in-play trading service? Contact us here.
