Cricket is one of the most widely watched sports in the world, but the betting market currently doesn’t reflect its large viewership – is this an untapped opportunity for operators and affiliates?
Sports betting and wagers play an important role in the sports ecosystem, particularly in engaging fans and keeping them interested. It is also a good way to introduce fans to new formats, metrics, and players within the sports such as football, boxing and horse racing.
But there is one glaring exception to this, which is cricket.
Cricket is widely regarded as the second most popular sport in the world with over 2.5 billion fans worldwide, and an incredibly active, attentive, and engaged fanbase.
Despite a large fan base, which is primarily situated in Commonwealth countries, the sport has very little presence in the sport betting community, and it struggles to engage with the gambling community in the US and UK.
A gap in the market
There’s one platform looking to plug this gap, Cricket Enthusiast. The site provides live scores, free‑to‑play predictor games, and betting odds comparisons for T20 BLAST, The Hundred, ETPL, and the IPL.
Affiliate Leaders spoke to Rohini Sardana, chief executive of WiseWager, and founder of Cricket Enthusiast, ahead of her appearance at Affiliate Leaders Summit, to find out more.
There’s a number of reasons for the lack of betting content, explains Sardana. “Cricket has certain nuances and it doesn’t help itself. One is a lot of abbreviations and terms that make onboarding difficult for a brand or a fan. You then also have different formats of cricket.”
That’s not the same for all sports. Plenty have a lot of complicated rules, niche acronyms, or a few different formats, but rarely does a sport have all three (and more).
“[With] football, the game is a game, it’s 90 minutes. With cricket, you’ve got lots of different formats. Then you tag on different advertising regulations based on the jurisdiction that you’re trying to target. So now you see how the complications and challenges are stacking up.”
This makes cricket a difficult environment for operators, especially when you add on complicated ad regulations across different regions.
But, this isn’t strictly a drawback. Although cricket is primarily a long game, it has hundreds of small, exciting moments where the entire audience is hooked.
“Thats what I think it not being captured today, at least from a betting perspective,” Sardana adds.
The opportunity
This presents an opportunity for operators and data platforms, which can provide insights, data, and recommendations into the game.
Fantastically, the tech is already there.
“The tech and data side is actually ahead, ball-tracking, real-time stats feeds, that infrastructure exists and it’s good,” Sardana explains.
“What’s missing is affiliate and marketing partners treating cricket the way they treat football outside its home markets, building the same kind of always-on content and engagement layer. The demand’s clearly there if you’re in the stadium, it just hasn’t been matched by partnership investment yet.”
There’s untapped potential for affiliate marketers to use the extensive sports tech infrastructure that cricket has already developed, with a huge existing fanbase already heavily invested.
A few, like CricketEnthusiast, are. “Affiliates are an extension of a brand,” Sardana elaborates. “That’s how I started from a B2B perspective, but I felt there was a gap [in the market].”
For the first time in over 100 years, cricket is set to feature in the Olympics, making its return at LA 2028. This is a big opportunity for operators to make the most of the wide viewership.
“I think that with more focus on the Olympics and cricket being part of that is likely to change how important it is for a sportsbook.”
But, its still a risk. Sardana explains that with so many well established sports betting markets, operators are hesitant to push the boat out.
“Bookmakers always want guaranteed margins, right? They don’t want to experiment and it makes sense – why would you put money where you’re not sure you’re going to get a return?”
The challenges
The difficulty here lies in the affiliate landscape. Marketers and publishers are all-too familiar with the phrase: “SEO is dead,” and whether you believe that or not, it is undeniably a tough time to be an affiliate.
“I think affiliates need to focus beyond content and look at being product-led and actually understanding what makes it work for the betting brand, but also what will engage an audience,” Sardana says. “As an affiliate, [it’s important] to be focused on building a community.”
Cricket is traditionally more popular in Commonwealth countries, but there’s a sprawl of different regions, regulations, and operators involved, and they’re not always as legitimate as you might hope.
“In gray or black markets specifically, cricket has real exposure there because betting demand exists in regions without licensed products,” Sardana explains.
“[CricketEnthusiast] is not competing with that activity, my audience is the regulated market, but it’s part of why cricket already has proven betting demand elsewhere, and that’s arguably an upside for whoever builds it properly.”
Despite the challenges affiliates and operators face, there’s plenty of space for growth. Betting landscapes for football, basketball, and the NFL may be saturated, but the rapidly evolving sector is building a powerful stage, and affiliates could be the facilitators to a global audience.
Next week, Sardana will feature alongside a panel of experts at the Affiliate Leaders Summit in Lisbon to discuss the intersection of sport, prediction markets, and AI powered trading.
The Affiliate Leaders Summit is the global home of performance and affiliate marketing. Across three days, affiliates, operators, media companies and technology providers come together to discuss traffic generation, conversion optimisation, SEO, paid media and the commercial strategies shaping the future of affiliate marketing.
Co-located with SBC Summit at Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena on 29 September-1 October. Get your tickets here.
