The Brazilian is admittedly passionate about football. This involvement of the population with the most popular sport in the country is not only limited to gambling, but also serves to boost other markets such as fantasy sports and betting.
Noting this immense potential for business, the Scout Gaming Group understands that it is time to invest in the region and increase the offer of games for this public focused on sports.
As one of the largest fantasy sports networks combined with a distribution of sensational prizes, the group even paid around € 200,000 for the top finish in this year’s Fantasy Premier League. In addition, Scout Gaming has some of the leading online operators as customers.
In an exclusive interview with the iGaming Brazil portal, Joakim Renma, COO of the company, detailed Scout’s plans for the country, the profile of the Brazilian player, expectations for the fantasy sports sector in the coming years and how the company dealt with the effects of the pandemic in recent months.
Read the full interview with Joakim Renman from Scout Gaming
iGaming Brazil: What are Scout Gaming’s plans for the Brazilian market?
Joakim Renman: First of all, we will support our existing partners, who we know are preparing to enter the Brazilian market, whether pre-regulation or not. Second, we hope to attract the attention of the main local sports and media players looking to capitalize on the online gaming market, which will soon be regulated.
iGaming Brazil: We see the relevance of Fantasy Sports growing every year, how much does this market move?
Joakim Renman: In the past three years, we have grown at a very fast pace, more or less doubling the revenue and the main KPIs each year. It’s the beginning, but if you look at the American real money DFS market, it’s at about $ 500 million dollars a year from GGR today, with an expected 50% growth in the next two years, that gives a glimpse of the future.
Forecasts are putting the European DFS market within a few years to reach levels similar to those in the US market and reaching around € 10 million today, we expect to see even greater growth in the next 2-3 years.
iGaming Brazil: Tell us how games created with Betsson will work in the Brazilian market.
Joakim Renman: Games are player-versus-player tournaments in which they compete for the top prize by selecting a mix of real-world athletes competing in real games and scoring based on a set of predefined scoring rules. The competitions will be daily, weekly and even throughout an entire season and there will always be two game options; one where admission is free and one paid to play.
The advantage of paying a little to play is that the rewards in paid competitions will be much higher than in free competitions. We are talking about millions of reais in potential earnings, the so-called “money to change life” prizes, which will certainly attract the attention of the Brazilian fan.
iGaming Brazil: What are the most sought games by the Brazilians?
Joakim Renman: Definitely, the local football events are the main attraction, but we also expect a lot of interest from the main international competitions, such as Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, Champions League, etc.
iGaming Brazil: What are the main differences between the Brazilian player and the others in Latin America?
Joakim Renman: There are few places in the world where the public is more passionate about football than Brazil. Being a popular sport in all Latin American countries I think still Brazil stands out in the level of passion, almost religious connection to football.
iGaming Brazil: How did the company dealt with the effects of the pandemic, especially last year with the suspension of most sporting events worldwide? What did you have to adjust to overcome this moment of restrictions?
Joakim Renman: We made a point early on to not under any circumstance cut staff, instead we cut our spending elsewhere such as travel and marketing meanwhile putting a heavy focus on developing our products.
An example was the move to swiftly launch eSports which to an extent helped us be better well positioned in the latter half of the year. I’m confident to say that we came our stronger than we were going in.
iGaming Brazil: During the first half of 2020, Scout Gaming also announced the launch of eSports products, also due to the stoppage of traditional sports. How was the performance of those products?
Joakim Renman: Initially it helped us recover more than 50% of lost revenue due to the sudden cancellation of sports. Since then when sports picked up again it’s subtracted but if you take major CS:GO events as an example, those are consistently coming in Top 5 on our most played events and with more and more players being drawn to the other sports such as LOL and DOTA2 we are look to esports as having the potential of securing a consistent Top 5-3 spot in our sport segment over a 3-5 year period.
iGaming Brazil: Do you follow the regulatory process in Brazil? What would be the possible changes to Scout Gaming after betting regulations in Brazil?
Joakim Renman: I don’t think the possibilities for us will change in a dramatically different way but I think that just as every time when a market regulates there will be opportunities that arise to which we must be ready.
