Backing your side to win the league or gain promotion was previously a regular occurrence and provided a turnover spike for European bookmakers in early August . Outrights, futures, long terms; whatever you call them, their significance as part of any sports offer has significantly diminished. They are less than 1% of annual football handle. But why?

From the sportsbook’s perspective, they’ve become an operational annoyance. They remain a requirement to stay on par with competitors, yet they are loss-making for many and a drain on precious trading man-hours for others. Very few operators possess automated internal models required to drive accurate, risk-managed pricing that’s scalable across all major leagues and market types. The majority rely on third-party feeds that cover only the bare minimum of betting options and suffer from incredibly poor uptime. Some task traders to suspend markets as fixtures kick off and ‘reprice’ when the weekend action is complete, often 48 hours or more later. The definition of ‘reprice’ in this scenario is essentially copying odds comparison sites with a few personal opinions thrown in. Derivative markets that were priced and available to customers pre-season may never reopen during the weeks ahead; only league winners and a handful of others survive, depending purely on what the trader has time for at the end of their shift.

For good reason, sportsbooks would rather promote the ever-growing array of player markets, team props, micro-markets, and Same Game Parlay (SGP) capabilities. These higher-margin markets are heavily backed by marketing spend and strategic app signposting.

There is undoubtedly a customer shift toward preferring player-based metrics over traditional team markets. But are customers rejecting futures because they don’t want to tie up their funds for nine months, or because the product offering has stagnated and is rarely available at the precise moments they actually want to bet? At Twenty First Group, we firmly believe it to be more the latter. The underlying demand for futures remains strong, provided the market is properly solved through constant availability, frictionless pricing and a dynamic range of short- and long-term betting options.

The methodology behind our solution was developed 10 years ago as a cornerstone of our advisory work. It has been recently re-trained and optimised specifically for the predictive accuracy of match and competition projections uniquely required by the modern betting industry. Our core proprietary IP lies in the defensive and attacking ratings for all club and international sides, which ultimately produce an intelligence-driven team rating. We utilise a novel methodology, combining the qualities of explicit score-based methods, such as Elo and autoregressive models, with implicit Bayesian models. These ratings are highly configurable and flexible, allowing them to be applied over subsets of competitions. They also feature dynamic parameters accounting for critical variables like game or player state.

From there, our Monte Carlo simulator runs off these unique team ratings. The two combine to create highly accurate, perpetually updated probabilities that drive the model, producing hundreds of outputs to service a sportsbook’s expanding requirements. We cover the foundational markets, league or cup winner, top X finishes, promotion, and relegation. But we also power vital derivative markets like season points, season wins, season goals, and season match bets, alongside short-term equivalents such as top of the table at the end of a specific month, monthly points totals, and team-specific win/goal milestones. Crucially, all of these are available for seamless integration into SGP and Bet Builder products, as the related contingencies are fully mapped within our outputs.

However, the definitive USP is delivering 100% uptime. Futures should update in real-time as goals go in and red cards are issued. Currently, across the industry, they do not. Operators either suspend markets at kickoff, as mentioned above, or leave stale prices up to be picked off by sharp clients and arbers. TFG’s flexible simulator is fast, leveraging parallel computing and conditional, event-driven simulations to update odds instantly from live incident feeds, eliminating manual trading overhead.

Think about the fan experience: when are you most likely to back your team to qualify for Europe? When they’re 2-0 up after 20 minutes and you’re giddy with excitement that the new manager is turning the club around. Today, a user logs in and finds the market suspended. But not if you’re a partner with TFG. We empower operators to be ready to take that bet, ready with dynamically updating cash-out values, and ready to drive always-on engagement until the season ends, giving customers a compelling reason to log in over and over again in the weeks and months ahead.

If you’re interested in forging deeper connection with your target audience, get in touch at will.Stephenson@twentyfirstgroup.com

Will Stephenson
Chief Betting Officer