By Conor Durnin, Co-Founder of The Unit

For years, the iGaming and sports betting industries have been able to deprioritise product innovation by turning their focus to aggressive customer acquisition spend and market growth. As long as new market opportunities have arisen and promotional activity has remained effective, operators have typically seen strong topline growth with this approach.

A look at some of the most recent earnings calls, however, suggests that the cracks are starting to appear in this model. Many global operators have become aware of this, with shareholder reactions prompting a return to a more customer-centric approach.

In their Q1 2026 earnings update, Flutter acknowledged that FanDuel had a smaller customer base than expected at the end of last year. Their CEO Peter Jackson publicly stated that the business needed to “go back to basics” to counter its issues with retention. Recently, the company reduced full-year EBITDA guidance from approximately $3.3bn to $2.9bn, while broader reporting pointed toward growing pressure around leadership and performance expectations.

If the dominant player in the U.S. market is openly discussing retention challenges, it suggests the industry is dealing with something much larger than a temporary dip.

Of course, marketing spend can drive downloads, registrations, and first deposits, but it doesn’t compensate for a product experience that fails to retain customers. FanDuel’s marketing succeeded in bringing users through the door, but they have admitted a need to cater to changing customer behaviour. Its post-earnings “improvement plan” focuses on functionality and features, and a product-based strategy.

With plenty of choice at their fingertips, modern betting customers can be unforgiving. If onboarding feels clunky, they leave. If live betting experiences feel slow or unintuitive, they don’t stick around. If same-game parlays are frustrating to build, they’re out.

The challenge for operators is that these UX and UI deficiencies can remain a hidden threat until it’s too late. During periods of market expansion, acquisition spend can cover up poor retention metrics and weak customer experiences. But eventually, markets mature, promotional efficiency declines, acquisition costs rise, and shareholders start demanding sustained profitability, rather than growth. At that point, as FanDuel has demonstrated, product quality becomes one of the primary commercial drivers for success.

Furthermore, the emergence and resilience of prediction markets increase the pressure on operators to focus on product quality. For years, the US sports betting market was heavily protected by state-by-state licensing. If an operator secured market access, invested heavily in acquisition, and established early brand recognition in newly regulated states, they were relatively insulated from competition. The barriers to entry were primarily regulatory and financial, rather than product-led.

Prediction markets, which are only bound by national CFTC regulation, threaten to disrupt that dynamic. While the regulatory position is still evolving, prediction markets are able to scale nationally far more quickly than traditional operators were able to in the post-PASPA expansion era. Hence, we’re seeing the likes of DraftKings make a significant push into the category (albeit one that is weighted towards marketing spend, rather than product).

Many of the traditional advantages sportsbooks once relied upon, including licensing barriers, first-mover advantages, and enormous acquisition spend, are becoming less impactful. In a market with lower structural barriers and more consumer choice, product experience becomes even more important. Simply put, more than ever, operators need to build products that customers genuinely prefer to use.

One of the biggest misconceptions in the industry is that operators do not understand where customer expectations are heading. In reality, most are run by very talented people who are keenly aware of the importance of better live betting experiences, smarter personalisation, stronger engagement mechanics, and more seamless user journeys.

The issue tends to be execution capacity. Internal product and engineering teams are often overwhelmed by maintaining existing systems, supporting market launches, handling integrations, and meeting regulatory obligations. That leaves very little room to innovate and create the projects that can be true difference makers.

Naturally, there’s no shortage of product investment among operators, but they may lack the capacity and dynamism to execute meaningful innovation fast enough to keep pace with the kind of changing customer expectations and behaviours that FanDuel recently referenced.

In mature markets, execution speed is a competitive advantage in itself. At The Unit, we partner with operators across regulated markets who are aware of the opportunities of quality product, but who need to outsource to achieve the capability and bandwidth required to execute quickly enough.

That may involve launching new betting products ahead of a major tournament, improving same-game parlay experiences before a new season, scaling frontend capability across multiple jurisdictions, or modernising legacy systems without disrupting existing operations.

FanDuel have been astute enough to recognise that ongoing success isn’t contingent on spend to fuel acquisition, preferring instead to focus on identifying customer behaviours faster, and retain customers more effectively.

The operators that build the infrastructure, partnerships, and delivery models needed to execute quickly, will create sustainable long-term advantages. The rest may learn that while marketing can bring customers through the door, only product quality convinces them to stay.

By Stephen A. Crystal, Founder and CEO, SCCG Management

When we announced the original partnership in September 2023, the brief was ambitious: take a young combat sports IP with a genuinely differentiated format and build it into a multi-vertical commercial brand. Sponsorships, ticketing, hospitality, merchandising, licensing, media rights, betting and data, gamification, casino content, and a collegiate circuit. Not a single revenue line. A stack.

The coverage that followed told us we were onto something. The story was picked up across the gaming trade press, including Gambling Insider, Gaming America, and the broader EIN Presswire syndication network. The narrative was simple: a real advisory firm and a real combat sports brand, building something new together.

Then we got to work.

In April 2024, we put PFC at the center of the 10th Arnold South America Sports Festival in São Paulo, the largest multi-sport event on the continent and a more than 100,000-attendee platform. PFC didn’t just appear at the Arnold. It was the centerpiece. PFCKids on day one, two days of pro competition after that, SBT TV in São Paulo carrying the broadcast, SCCG branding on the ring corners, the mats, even the pillows themselves. For a young league, that kind of integration into a flagship continental festival is the sort of thing that usually takes a decade. We did it in the first six months of the engagement.

Three months later, in July 2024, SCCG was named title sponsor of the inaugural FightPFC Rio Challenge at Legustarecreio in Rio de Janeiro. The Rio event was important for two reasons. First, it formalized PFC’s foothold in Brazil, which is one of the most exciting combat sports markets in the world right now. Second, it gave us a real-world look at PFC’s audience traction: at that point the league’s content was already producing more than 27 million plays, 419,000 likes, 390,000 shares, 15.3 million accounts reached, and 850,000 interactions on a single recent reel. Those are numbers most established combat sports brands would happily claim. PFC was generating them as a still-emerging property.

Then, in October 2024, we brought PFC to the biggest stage in fitness and physique sport on the planet: Mr. Olympia 2024 in São Paulo. Three days at the Anhembi District, live PFC battles in front of one of the most concentrated, brand-conscious sports audiences in the world, and direct exposure to the kind of sponsors, broadcasters, and licensees who pay attention to what happens at Mr. Olympia. Gaming America covered the announcement and the trade press once again reinforced the trajectory.

The validation kept compounding. In August 2025, PFC returned to ESPN2 as part of ESPN8: The Ocho, broadcast live from the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, with Hush coming on board as the headline presenting sponsor. A sleep brand sponsoring a combat sport, live on ESPN2, on a tentpole programming property. That is exactly the kind of category-bending commercial moment we said this IP would create when we signed up in 2023.

Three continents. Multiple flagship events. Trade press coverage across the gaming, sports, and combat sports ecosystems. Real brand sponsors lining up. That is the foundation we’re building the next phase on.

Why We’re Extending, and Why Now

Here’s the honest version. Most early-stage sports IP plateaus. The format gets some traction, the founder runs out of runway, the broadcast partners get nervous, and the brand drifts into the long tail. That is the default path.

PFC has not been on that path. The opposite, actually. Every quarter the audience numbers have grown, every flagship event has produced a tier of partner conversations we couldn’t have had the quarter before, and the format has held up under exactly the kind of scrutiny that breaks weaker IP. The combat sports structure is real. The athletes are real. The entertainment value travels across language and market. And the format is purpose-built for the way audiences actually consume sports in 2026: live, broadcast, and short-form digital, all at once.

That is why we are extending now. Not because we have to, but because the next 24 months are where the compounding really starts to show up, and we want to be on the field for it.

What the Extension Focuses On

Under the extended engagement, SCCG will continue to identify and introduce qualified counterparts across the full PFC commercial stack. To be specific:

• Sponsorship partners, building on the brand category expansion that Hush, the Arnold, and Mr. Olympia have already validated
• Broadcast and OTT distributors, extending the ESPN2 / The Ocho moment into a more durable distribution footprint across North America, Latin America, and other key global markets
• Sportsbook and data partners, for both pre-match and in-event wagering markets, with the right regulatory framing in each jurisdiction
• Gamification and casino content licensees, covering slots, table games, and virtuals built around the PFC brand
• Hospitality and venue partners, supporting live event monetization and on-property activations
• Collegiate and grassroots circuit operators, where PFC has a genuine and largely untapped opportunity to build a feeder pipeline and a future broadcast property

SCCG operates as a non-exclusive advisor. PFC retains full discretion over the contractual terms of any partner relationship. That is exactly how it should be, and that is the model that has worked for two and a half years.

A Word About the Markets

A lot of what we have done with PFC so far has happened in Latin America, and especially in Brazil. That is not a coincidence. Brazil is one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving sports betting and combat sports markets in the world, and our team has spent years building the operator, regulator, and partner relationships that allow a property like PFC to land cleanly there. The extension keeps that LATAM momentum going, and it adds bandwidth for the North American broadcast and sponsorship work that PFC’s ESPN moment opened up.

It also keeps the door open for the markets we know PFC can travel to next, including Europe and select Asian markets where the combination of combat sports culture, short-form digital consumption, and family-friendly framing is a near-perfect fit.

What I Want People to Take Away From This

Three things.

One. PFC is not a novelty. It is a real combat sports IP with real audience traction, real broadcast distribution, and a real commercial roadmap. The trade press has been telling that story since 2023, and the receipts have only gotten louder since.

Two. The SCCG playbook works. Take a differentiated property, build a multi-vertical commercial stack around it, put the brand on stages that matter (Arnold, Rio, Mr. Olympia, ESPN), and let the compounding do its job. That is what we have done across more than 120 client-partners and 30-plus years in the industry, and it is exactly what we are continuing to do here.

Three. If you are an operator, a broadcaster, a sportsbook, a content licensee, a venue, or a brand looking for a combat sports property that genuinely travels across categories, this is the moment to be in the conversation. The next 24 months are going to move fast.

To Steve Williams and the entire PFC team: thank you for the trust, thank you for the partnership, and let’s go build the next chapter.

This is going to be a lot of fun.