Punters winning more NFL bets are set to dent FanDuel owner Flutter’s profits

DraftKings’ biggest rival and the world’s largest online-betting company, Flutter Entertainment, is seeing a short-term hit to its bottom line from customers’ sweetest dream: gamblers are winning too much.

In a surprise trading update on Tuesday, the group (emphasis ours) detailed that:

“The 2024/2025 NFL season to date has been the most customer friendly since the launch of online sports betting with the highest rate of favorites winning in nearly 20 years.”

The “very unfavorable US sports results” are set to cost Flutter Entertainment some ~$390 million in revenue, with the company’s shares listed in London opening down 5% this morning — though the stock has since recovered all of that initial drop, with rival DraftKings also trading higher.

It’s ironic that it should be the NFL — America’s favorite league to bet on — at the heart of Flutter’s current issues, as the Dublin-headquartered group has increasingly placed its own chips on the US market, including abandoning the London Stock Exchange to move its primary listing to New York last May.

Since first combining with FanDuel seven years ago, Flutter has grown rapidly, capitalizing on the changing regulatory landscape in America, which has quickly become the company’s most important region: revenues from the US market now account for 38% of its business, up from just 12% in 2020.

Elsewhere, sports results continued a “good momentum” in the UK and Ireland region (read: punters are still losing on the English Premier League).