The news last week that Fanatics had passed on buying its way into the sports-betting market via an acquisition of PointsBet and was now focused on building its own operation fits a pattern when it comes to how operators often view the issue of ‘owning the tech’.
We start with the unlikely-in-this-context historical figure of Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch to rule France and largely remembered for his significant blunders on the world stage.
They include the ill-fated intervention in Mexico when he installed Maximillian as Emperor, a move which ended in a humiliating failure and Maximillian’s execution by firing squad, and ultimately defeat in 1870 to the Prussians, leading to his dethronement and exile.
“Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.” AJP Taylor, the legendary English historian said of him.
The sentiment of the comment resonates within the ongoing debate over owning the tech in sports betting and whether Fanatics has taken the wrong path so early in the game.
Direction of travel
“Owning your own tech gives you mastery of your own destiny but you also have to think about what your actual destiny is,” points out Neale Deeley, managing director for U.S. betting at Sportradar.
The elements of the tech that any operator should want to own, Deeley argues, are the elements that a consumer actually interacts with; the user experience, the promotional side and “all the elements where your brand values can come to the fore,” he says.
The rest – the bet engine, the bet settlement, the data side, even the trading and risk management – have all been done many times before. “This is where you would likely be reinventing the wheel,” he says.
“You have to ask yourself: do we want to go to the bother, the expense, of building an element of tech that we can literally buy off the shelf? I mean, no one would try and build a cloud storage system when you can get that off AWS.”
Time horizons
The task of “threading the needle”, as Deeley puts it, between owning the bits of tech where a company feels it needs proprietary control and outsourcing the rest is made more complicated by the fractured nature of the regulatory frameworks for each state.
As Avi Howard, CEO at USAbility, suggests a common failing when it comes to building a product offering to fit the requirements in each state is to under-estimate how much work that involves in building a sportsbook product from scratch
Even if a key element such as the PAM – the Player Account Management system – is outsourced, there is still a huge amount of work needed around integrating the sportsbook to the PAM, as well as to other services such as trading feeds and front end technologies.
“Developing the product itself should be the ‘easy’ thing to do,” he points out. “However, doing it ‘from scratch’, while hiring staff in multiple global locations, and in a time where everything in and around the product is changing, will leave little time for the product development teams to play together as a band – or a good one at least.”
Time pressures
All this at a time when no one else in the market is standing still. Howard makes the obvious point that Fanatics is playing catch up in a market “that doesn’t wait for anyone”.
Indeed, management teams across the sector are locked in a constant cycle of re-assessing and re-evaluating their own tech capabilities and the extent of their reliance on third parties.
“Buy and build is not truly a binary choice,” adds Deeley. “It’s always a buy-and-build equation and the debate is about where each operator lays the emphasis to best fit their aims.”
Fanatics is in a good position as far as it knows it has access to a sports-focused audience.
Howard says that having a huge sports-oriented customer base is a “good start”. “But the conversion of those customers to punters is not guaranteed if the product isn’t on the level of the competitions,” he warns.
“Punters are likely to still choose to bet elsewhere and not with a brand they are already associated with, if the product is better.”
The test comes on day one
At some point, Fanatics will get to see how its brand is received in the sports-betting arena – and how the platform it launches with performs under the pressure of a live environment. It’s only then that the decisions made in the lead up around tech will be tested.
That is just the start of the journey, though. “Based on what we see in the market, for a well-funded company with an experienced leadership that has done this before, it could easily take two-to-three years to build a product for a complex market as the US,” says Howard.
“Even then, we wouldn’t expect it to be a ‘market-leading’ product as certain things just take time. Remember that the tech this is running the leading sportsbooks in the US has been around and refined for many years.”
As Deeley says, “unfortunately, there are no perfect answers”.
“But what really matters – regardless of what combination of buy and build you put together – is that you know the direction of travel and are executing on the plan.”
