Gambling Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among European Regular Sports Bettors: An Empirical Study Using Behavioral Tracking Data

The novel coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had major impacts on most societies worldwide including the cancelation and postponement of sports events. This has had a major impact on the sports betting industry. The present study is first to investigate the behavior of a sample of online sports bettors before and after COVID-19 measures were put in place by European governments. The authors were given access to the player data by a large European online gambling operator comprising players from Sweden, Germany, Finland, and Norway. The behavioral change of the sports bettors before March 7 and after March 7 (2020) was computed. All sports bettors who placed at least one wager in at least 5 calendar weeks out of the 10 possible calendar weeks between January 1 and March 7 (n = 5396) were included in the analysis. Results showed statistically significant reductions among sports bettors wagering in online casinos. This indicates that there was no conversion of money spent from sports betting to online casino games, at least for this particular online gambling operator. The findings suggest that there was a significant decrease in the amount of money wagered by sports bettors during the COVID-19 pandemic (compared with before it) and that sports bettors did not switch to playing more online casino games and that there was also a significant reduction in playing online casino games among sports bettors.