Author: Ramiro Atucha, Board Advisor to Kiron Interactive
The 2026 World Cup is underway, and many sportsbook operators are seeing huge acquisition spikes. It is undoubtedly the biggest World Cup in history, with a record number of teams and games. This, combined with more North American and Latin American markets becoming regulated in recent years, means that the commercial potential of this tournament completely outshines anything that has come before.
Like all great things, though, the World Cup must come to an end, and what often follows it for operators is a period of prolonged silence. With no major European or Latin American leagues taking place until mid-late August, the tournament finishes, the content dries up, and sports bettors who have been emotionally invested in football for the last six weeks have nothing to do. While more experienced or regular sports bettors will wait it out, operators run a serious risk of losing many of the new bettors they have acquired through the tournament.
A Different Kind of Interest
Much of the conversation around virtual sports and the World Cup centres on what it can bring to the table during the tournament and the problems it solves: providing entertainment in dead rubbers, covering inconvenient kick-off times, filling the quiet hours between fixtures, and so on. While these are all perfectly valid arguments, another major commercial benefit of virtual sports lies in what they can do after the tournament ends, and how they can provide the perfect solution to the post-World-Cup churn problem.
What smart operators understand is that it is not just the football that attracts bettors to the World Cup; it is the drama and excitement of the tournament format. Knockout football creates a different kind of tension, and teams’ journeys create narratives for bettors to invest in. Similarly, many casual fans who do not necessarily support a club team become heavily invested in their national team’s performance. The World Cup has a tendency to stir up a special kind of passion from fans, especially when an underdog overperforms.
Virtual sports is perfectly positioned to replicate this feeling. Group stages, knockout games, international teams, all of this can be recreated through virtual sports products, and unlike the World Cup, it is not beholden to a schedule. Bettors can jump in and out of the action whenever they need.
This matters more in 2026 than in any previous World Cup. LatAm’s regulated betting markets have pulled in a huge number of first-time bettors during the tournament, and the churn rate among these is likely to be high. These have been drawn in by the excitement and the emotion of the occasion, rather than being regular bettors, and without the World Cup to keep them invested, many will disengage.
Commercial Benefits
The economics of the World Cup are also interesting. Customer acquisition costs during the tournament are extremely high, with competition from across the industry being fierce, and businesses funnelling huge amounts of money into their marketing. Operators who are able to convert this acquisition into long-term engagement after the final whistle is blown are the ones who are going to see the best returns on those investments, while those who have chased the short-term boost may find themselves in a difficult position.
Further to this, in newly regulated markets, this kind of long-term engagement can have other benefits. Regulators and operators are still maturing and working to understand what responsible growth looks like. Building a sustained, active customer base is much healthier for the wider market than one that sees a huge spike for a tournament and then watches the numbers fall off a cliff overnight. Operators becoming too dependent on event cycles is not good for long-term business.
Long-Term Thinking
We are in the midst of a summer delivering some of the best sporting action we have ever seen. For operators who can not capitalise on this attention spike in the long-term, the silence after the final whistle will be deafening. The operators most likely to succeed will already be thinking about what their next steps are after the World Cup has finished, and how they can continue to build on its momentum.
