Ask anyone in iGaming what they think of HR and you will get a sigh before you get a sentence. Slow onboarding, generic policies, exit interviews that go nowhere, a “confidential” chat that somehow finds its way back to your manager. It is not unique to this industry. But iGaming has a habit of moving at breakneck speed while its people function limps along with the pace of a 2015 spreadsheet.
Here is the fun bit. There is an industry that has already solved a version of this problem, and it plays on grass every weekend. Football clubs manage some of the most volatile, high-pressure, short-contract workforces on the planet, and many of them do it better than most iGaming operators manage a compliance team. Squads turn over almost entirely every few seasons, performance is judged in public every single week, and yet the best clubs still find a way to develop people rather than simply process them. So let’s put the two on the same pitch and see what actually transfers.
Kick-Off: Why HR Struggles Specifically in iGaming
iGaming has grown faster than its own people infrastructure. Studios, aggregators and operators scaled headcount in a few short years, often across a dozen time zones, with HR playing catch-up rather than building anything strategic. A handful of recurring issues show up again and again.
- Compliance-first hiring. Background checks, licensing requirements and integrity screening exist for good reason, but they can turn recruitment into an interrogation before anyone has even discussed the role.
- Remote, borderless teams. A support agent in Manila, a game designer in Malta and a compliance officer in Gibraltar rarely get the same onboarding, the same career conversation or the same manager attention.
- Burnout hiding in plain sight. Live casino, customer support and trading teams often run around the clock, yet wellbeing initiatives are frequently a poster in the break room rather than a resourced programme.
- Generalist HR, specialist problems. One HR manager is expected to handle payroll, compliance training, culture and career development for a workforce that includes traders, developers, marketers and compliance officers all at once.
None of this is a scandal. It is what happens when a young, fast-growing sector treats HR as an admin function instead of a performance function.
Half-Time Whistle: What’s Actually Going Wrong
The deeper issue is structural. HR sits between the employee and the employer, and its budget, targets and reporting line all point one way. When a genuine grievance also represents legal exposure, most HR teams will protect the company, because that is what they are measured on.
Add to that a set of KPIs built around cost-per-hire and time-to-fill rather than “did this person feel supported”, and you get a function optimised for paperwork rather than people. iGaming, still building its HR maturity from scratch, has inherited all of these tensions with none of the decades of internal process that older, slower-moving industries have had time to patch.
Second Half: What Football Clubs Get Right
Elite football clubs face an extreme version of the same challenge. Contracts are short. Turnover, quite literally, is the business model. Performance pressure is relentless and public. Yet the best clubs have built structures that treat their people as assets to be developed, not headcount to be processed.
Specialist Roles Instead of One Generalist
A modern first team does not have one person responsible for fitness, nutrition, psychology, tactics and recruitment. It has a strength coach, a sports psychologist, a recruitment analyst and a head of performance, all coordinated rather than siloed. Some clubs formalise this further through what researchers call a department of methodology, where specialist coaches and sport science staff work from one shared framework instead of pulling in different directions.
Compare that with a typical iGaming operator, where one HR generalist is asked to be payroll administrator, culture champion, recruiter and mental health first-aider in the same afternoon. The football model does not work because clubs have more money. It works because they have decided that people development deserves the same specialisation as any other part of the business.
Individual Development Plans, Not Annual Reviews
Academy and first-team environments increasingly build individual development plans around each player, discussed openly, revisited constantly and adjusted as circumstances change. It is the opposite of the once-a-year performance review that most companies, iGaming included, still rely on.
Psychological Safety as a Design Choice
Recent sport science guidance on player development stresses building trust, psychological safety and open communication as a deliberate structural goal, not a nice-to-have. That is a world away from a workplace where raising a concern to HR feels like a risk in itself.
Recruitment as Scouting, Not Backfilling
A scout does not wait until a striker leaves before looking for a replacement. Clubs track prospects for years, build relationships long before a contract is on the table, and know exactly what a player will add to the squad before a single conversation about salary happens. Recruitment in that world is a continuous, forward-looking discipline rather than a scramble triggered by a resignation letter.
Most iGaming hiring runs the other way. A key compliance officer or product lead resigns, and only then does the search begin, usually under time pressure, often through the same recruiter used for every role regardless of function. There is no pipeline, no relationship built in advance, just a job advert and a hope. Building even a lightweight version of a scouting network, tracking strong candidates in adjacent companies long before a vacancy exists, would save most operators from the panic-hire cycle that quietly damages team culture every single time it happens.
Full Time: Where the Analogy Breaks Down
This is not a case for uncritically copying football. The same environments that produce brilliant player care often fail their own staff. Academic research using Manchester United as a case study found that HRM practices for club managers remain largely reactive rather than strategic, with short-term results consistently prioritised over long-term wellbeing. Burnout among elite football staff is well documented, not solved.
The lesson, then, is not “football has cracked HR”. It is that specialisation, individualised development and psychological safety are structural choices any organisation can make, regardless of industry, and that even organisations with far greater resources than a typical iGaming operator still have to fight for them deliberately.
There is also a resourcing reality worth naming honestly. A Premier League club can fund a full performance department because broadcast revenue and matchday income make that possible. A mid-sized iGaming affiliate or a ten-person crypto casino start-up cannot replicate a Category One academy overnight, and pretending otherwise would set unrealistic expectations. The point is not to copy the budget. It is to copy the underlying decision to treat people development as a specialist function worth designing on purpose, at whatever scale a company can afford.
What iGaming Operators Can Actually Borrow
- Split the HR generalist role by function. Even a small operator can separate compliance-driven HR admin from genuine people development, rather than asking one person to do both badly.
- Build a real development conversation, not a form. Replace the annual review with quarterly check-ins tied to actual career paths, the way a club plans a player’s next eighteen months rather than their next ninety minutes.
- Treat retention like squad building. Clubs plan replacements and succession years in advance. Operators reacting to resignations with a rushed job advert are doing the HR equivalent of a January transfer panic.
- Invest in psychological safety before you need it. A confidential, genuinely independent way to raise concerns costs far less than the cost of losing good people to a toxic team.
iGaming has already been forced to rethink its talent strategy once, as the iGaming talent reset made clear after a wave of layoffs and hiring corrections rippled through the sector. The operators pulling ahead on culture are the same ones showing up on lists of the best iGaming employers in the industry. That is not a coincidence.
The Final Score
HR does not fail in iGaming, or anywhere else, because the people in the role do not care. It fails because most companies still treat people management as an administrative afterthought rather than a specialist discipline worth investing in properly. Football clubs prove that even under brutal pressure and constant turnover, a more deliberate structure is possible. It just takes a willingness to stop running HR like a compliance checklist and start running it like a performance department.
If Business of iGaming’s coverage of talent, culture and careers is useful to your team, explore our Career section for more analysis on what is actually working across the industry, and get in touch if there is a story about people and culture in iGaming we should be covering.
