By Andy Serwer

With the Super Bowl fast approaching, millions of Americans' minds are turning to betting.

Thirty-eight states now allow for legal sports betting -- and the American Gaming Association (AGA) estimates that Americans will wager a record $1.39 billion legally on Super Bowl LIX.

One company oh-so-poised to benefit is Flutter Entertainment, which owns the popular U.S. online sports betting site FanDuel.

I recently spoke with Peter Jackson, Flutter's CEO, as part of our At Barron's interview series to ask him about all things sports betting. Below are some highlights from our conversation, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

The most important thing Jackson focuses on

"Large businesses like ours always have a degree of complexity in them. We're really focused on making sure that we offer our customers a fantastic experience. That's the job of our teams around the world. If you try to run marketing centrally, you lose the nuance of what you need to do in the local market.

"If I talk about football, you're immediately thinking about the Super Bowl that will be coming up. Whereas, if I talk about football, some people in the UK will be thinking about the Liverpool game. "

The state of sports betting in the U.S.

"We can go back to the 14th of May [2018], when [the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act] was repealed [...] that was essentially the thing that switched on sports betting in the U.S. as we see it today. It conferred on the states the rights to make a decision as to whether they would allow sports betting to happen or not, and the first state out of the gates was New Jersey.

"So FanDuel was up and running by the football season in 2018, when sports betting was legalized. And since then, we got to ourselves to a point where a large chunk of the U.S. population can now bet on sports. It's not available everywhere yet."

How the government prevents a user in one state from setting up an account and betting in another

"There are very tight restrictions on, you know, how you can actually use your sort of cell phone to get on and bet on sports.

"So actually here in Manhattan, when New Yorkers were not allowed to bet yet [...] but you could in New Jersey, you know, you'd actually have to travel across the bridge and be a meter past the halfway point on the bridge so that you were definitely in New Jersey before your phone would register using geolocational technology [...] and so, you know, it isn't just where you tell your phone.

"You can't spoof it using VPNs or those types of things. Your phone triangulates cell phone towers and various other things to work out very precisely where you are. And that determines, you know, whether you are in a place where you're allowed to bet on sports."

On how Flutter handles negative side effects from the business, such as betting addiction, bankruptcy, and suicides

"We take this very, very seriously, you know. I mean everything, you know, from the way that incentives for everybody in the business are pulled together [...] we have responsible gambling measures for everybody in their bonuses, so this is something we've sort of put our money where our mouth is.

"But we also invest a lot of money, as well. So you know, last year we put $100 million into the research and education and treatment and trying to identify how we can get better at spotting customers who are at risk of becoming problem gamblers and intervening.

"So there's many customers on the platform who enjoy [placing a bet] -- they're putting their $20 on their parlay. You know, they're enjoying watching the Rams, you know, beat the Vikings or whatever [...] but for a very small number of customers, they can get themselves into trouble.

"And so we work really hard to try and identify those customers, and if necessary, we will stop them, right? We'll block people, we'll -- we won't let them participate anymore."

On protecting the integrity of the game, betting by athletes and referees, and cheating

"It's crucial that if, you know, people are watching a game, that they know it's down to the [...] trajectory of the match, right? There's nothing untoward going to happen. And you know, the benefit we have is the amount of data and insights we get to see, right?

"We can spot anomalies, right? And if we see in some strange, you know, tennis game that's going on in a remote part of the world there's a lot of money going on and that's a very unexpected, you know, event, and they seem to be betting on the underdog and somehow the underdog wins? You know, we'll be all over that.

"So we can spot those patterns. We have contracts with all of the major sporting, you know, leagues around the world from an integrity perspective, and we share insights and data that we see."

Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com

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February 06, 2025 11:08 ET (16:08 GMT)

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