Participants

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

Summary

The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins this June, and it is set to create one of the biggest acquisition opportunities the iGaming industry has witnessed. Naturally, all of the attention this summer will turn to sportsbooks, but with many operators also offering online casinos, how can they ensure that their casinos benefit from this football-driven traffic increase?

The opportunity is real, but so is the risk of missing it. Many casual bettors will be signing up for a summer of betting action, and this represents a new, untapped audience for online casinos. However, converting sports bettors into online casino players, and vice versa, is a notoriously difficult challenge, and it is one many operators will be hoping to overcome this summer.

For this roundtable, we’ve brought together a panel of experts from different sectors of the industry to explore how online casinos can take advantage of this opportunity, what kind of casino content interests sports bettors, and more.

With millions of new sports bettors expected to sign up, what can operators do to make the most of this window?

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

The goal is simple. Get people active and keep them active for the whole tournament, not just one match. The audience is genuinely there. Deutsche Bank reckons US handle alone lands somewhere between 2.5 and 4.1 billion dollars, more than double Qatar 2022. But a clean, fast sign-up is everything. These are casual punters.

They will abandon a long registration mid-game, so any friction at deposit, KYC or withdrawal costs you the customer on the spot. Once they are in, that is where you open up the cross-sell into a casino and live casino.

At Kongebonus we see this with our Norwegian audience every tournament. The mistake most operators make is treating the sign-up as the win. It is not. It is just the door. The actual work is giving someone a reason to come back for the next match day, and the one after that.

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

The sign-up moment is everything. Onboarding flows need to surface casino products immediately, and welcome offers should reward exploration across both verticals from day one.

New registrants during a tournament are impulse-driven, and the window between matches is prime casino time. Operators need automated triggers that capitalise on those gaps. This means post-match lobby pushes, half-time promos, and next-day re-engagement.

KYC and payment friction will kill conversion faster than any competitor, so operators who have invested in fast verification and instant withdrawals will win the acquisition battle.

And don’t treat it as a pure volume play. Segmenting new users early allows for smarter casino cross-sell from the very start.

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

The market will be saturated with promotions, that’s a given. Providers should go beyond the standard offer and think carefully about how they build their promotions to fit their operator partners needs: the mechanics, the timing, the creative execution, and crucially, how well it reflects the season.

At ICONIC21, personalization is at the core of what we offer, and the FIFA World Cup is exactly where that capability becomes a real competitive differentiator. We can move quickly to adapt games and content to a specific theme and audience profile. Football Cup Roulette, Football Cup Blackjack 360, Football Cup Gravity Blackjack are all examples of that in practice. Operators don’t need to rely on generic, off-the-shelf content during one of the biggest acquisition windows of the year. The technology and the partnerships exist to do something genuinely distinctive. The question is how operators choose to use them.

What have previous tournaments taught us about how sports bettors interact with casino products, and how can the industry prepare?

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

We have learned that cross-selling into casino is genuinely hard, and most operators reach for the easy route. Halftime free spins. You will see them everywhere this summer. There is nothing wrong with that. A free-spin offer while someone is already logged in is a sensible nudge. But be realistic about who these people are.

Most FIFA World Cup traffic is occasional punters who log in, stick a tenner on Norway or a correct score, and move on hoping for the best. Research shows this type often does not know the sector’s vocabulary and will not sit through a long process mid-match. So the lesson is straightforward. Do your retention work while they are actually active and engaged. That window is short. Once the match ends, the attention is gone, and no amount of clever follow-up brings it back.

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

Euro 2020 and Qatar 2022 both showed the same pattern – casino engagement spikes on match days. The gap days are where operators lose people.

Live casino consistently outperforms slots during tournaments because it mirrors the event feeling of watching a match.

The clearest lesson is that operators who built cross-sell journeys before the tournament started outperformed those who reacted in real time.

Loyalty and gamification mechanics that ran across both verticals – a FIFA World Cup leaderboard rewarding sports and casino play alike – showed meaningful uplift.

It’s important to understand that the preparation window matters more than in-tournament creativity.

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

What past tournaments consistently show is that the boundaries between verticals are more permeable than we sometimes assume. A player who arrives through sportsbook during a major tournament is not necessarily a sportsbook-only player forever. Context and theme play an enormous role in where attention goes.

Cross-sell remains one of the most valuable and underutilized levers in the industry. During this season, actually all verticals matter, and operators who maintain a healthy, well-curated mix of live casino, slots, and RNG content alongside their sportsbook offering, if available, are the ones best positioned to capture that wider engagement.

The theme itself does a lot of the work. Football enthusiasm creates a mood and that mood travels across verticals. Players who might not ordinarily gravitate toward a slot or a live table will engage with one that feels connected to the moment they’re already excited about. The industry’s job is to make that journey feel natural.

How do casino-first operators stay visible and relevant when sportsbook brands dominate the tournament?

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

Honestly, this worry is a little overblown. Casino-first players stay casino-first players. If they fancy a FIFA World Cup bet, they already know exactly where to find it, so you do not need to fight hard to cross-sell them. And here is what people forget. If a big operator runs a huge sportsbook campaign and that same player already uses their casino, the player is being reminded of the brand, not lost to it. Nobody suddenly forgets what an operator does just because the marketing went football-flavoured for a month. So, casino-first brands should not panic and try to out-shout the sportsbooks. Stay true to the product. Lean into what makes you different.

Trust that your audience knows you. The summer noise fades by July. Your core proposition should not move an inch while everyone else is shouting about Mbappé.

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

Casino-first operators shouldn’t try to out-shout sportsbooks on football, because they’ll lose that battle on media spend.

The smarter play is owning the moments between matches and positioning casino as the entertainment layer around the tournament, not a competitor to it. Influencer and affiliate channels that are casino-native can carry the brand without getting drowned out in sports media noise.

But the real weapon is CRM. Direct-to-player communication doesn’t compete with broadcast budgets, and a well-timed push notification at 10pm after the final whistle will outperform a TV spot every time.

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

Relevance comes from keeping content fresh, timely, and specific and that’s where well-structured promotions earn their place. They represent content engines and player acquisition tools. The entire technical setup of the promotion shapes how a provider’s portfolio feels to a player during a tournament window.

We’re running the ICONIC Showdown football cup tournament across 11 of our games, with a particular focus on our limited-time personalized titles: Football Cup Roulette, Football Cup Blackjack 360, Football Cup Gravity Blackjack and The Kickoff. Alongside the promotion, we’ve launched Soccer World Championship, a football-themed slot designed to encourage natural cross-play between verticals.

Casino-first operators don’t need to compete with sportsbook on sportsbook’s terms. They need to offer an experience that’s thematically connected to the season while playing to the strengths of their own offerings.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup spans three countries and multiple time zones. How does the fragmented schedule affect preparation, and can content counter it?

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

The schedule is the single biggest challenge for us in the Nordics, and also the biggest opportunity. With matches landing late at night or at odd hours, the Norwegian fan is often watching alone. Partner asleep, no one to react with. That gap is exactly what we built the Kongebonus World Cup hub around, what we are calling the home of the second screen. It centres on a live, moderated chat where fans follow the action together, share predictions and react in real time, alongside a free Pick’em game and a leaderboard. From a content angle, the answer to a fragmented schedule is not more odds. It is connection. Give people somewhere to actually be during those midnight kick-offs and the awkward time zones stop being a reason to switch off. They become a reason to show up.

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

With matches running across the USA, Canada, and Mexico, there’s no clean primetime window. Kick-offs will be spread from early afternoon through late evening, depending on the market.

Honestly, this is an opportunity for casino. There will always be a gap in any time zone where no match is live, and smart promotion scheduling around local match times can fill those windows.

For operators serving Latin American markets – particularly relevant given Mexico’s co-hosting – the operational challenge is CRM.

Campaigns need to be time-zone aware. A blanket broadcast approach will underperform, which means timing localisation is as important as language localisation.

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

The fragmented schedule is actually less of a constraint than it might appear because not everything needs to be tied directly to a specific match time or result. The atmosphere and the theme carry their own power, and content that captures that energy will perform regardless of which time zone a player is in.

Our approach with the ICONIC Showdown reflects that thinking. We’re running the promotion from the 9th to the 19th of July, aligning with the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and the final. Those are the moments that carry the most weight emotionally and commercially. That gives players a meaningful window to engage at their own pace, rather than chasing a narrow match-by-match timeline.

There’s also a practical advantage to this approach: a lot of providers are running activations across the entire tournament period, including the build-up. By focusing on the decisive phase, we’re competing on quality of moment rather than volume of coverage and giving the promotion room to breathe.

What casino content will perform best, and are operators treating casino and sportsbook players as one connected audience?

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

If your cross-sell strategy is a tired football-themed slot, it will not work. It is lazy and players see straight through it. And please, do not just default to Starburst either. The way to actually turn a football crowd into casino play is to put your best content in front of them. The most genuinely fun, highest-quality slots you have, football-themed or not. People do not engage with a mediocre game because it has a ball on the reels. They engage with a great game. So yes, treat them as one connected audience, but respect them as one.

The connected-audience thinking only pays off if the product on the other side is something a person would actually choose to play. Quality is the cross-sell. The theme is just decoration, and decoration has never retained anybody.

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

Football-themed slots are the obvious answer, but the honest truth is most underdeliver.

The studios doing it well are building mechanic-first games that happen to carry a football skin, not the other way around.

Live casino, particularly game shows, is the format most likely to resonate with sports bettors, because they provide real-time, social, high-energy action that feels closest to watching a match.

The harder truth is that the industry remains largely siloed, with separate CRM journeys, separate bonus budgets, and separate teams. The player doesn’t see two products.

The ones who will win this summer are those with a unified player view who serve casino as a natural extension of the sports experience.

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

Themed content will lead. Players respond to content that reflects the moment they’re living in, and football is one of the few cultural events that cuts across demographics broadly enough to work across all verticals simultaneously.

Our power lies in the breadth of what we offer: live casino, slots, and RNG games, representing three verticals that each bring something distinct to a player’s experience, and that together create a genuinely comprehensive product environment for operators. During the World Cup, we are using exactly that mix.

On the question of treating casino and sportsbook players as a connected audience, the reality is that the audiences will remain largely distinct in their primary behaviours. But they can absolutely be united by theme, by atmosphere, and by an experience that makes movement between verticals feel intuitive.

How can operators balance short-term acquisition with long-term retention after the tournament ends?

David Nilsen, Editor-in-Chief, Kongebonus

Be sober about this. Long-term retention is always the hard part at a mega-event. Huge numbers of occasional players come in, have two or three bets on their country, and they are gone. That is just the nature of it.

Spamming them afterwards genuinely does not work. The real strategy is to use the active window to show a product worth returning to, then plant a hook into the future. Get them to place a season-long outright on the next Premier League or Champions League, or a bet on the opening weekend with a small reward attached. Optimove found 65 percent of US bettors plan to keep wagering even after their team is knocked out, so the appetite to stay is there. You will not turn most occasional punters into casino regulars. That is a fantasy. But you can become the operator they instinctively return to next time.

Yoni Sidi, CEO at Winpot.mx

The biggest mistake is building welcome offers that are purely sports-focused – you acquire a sports bettor, and that’s all you ever have.

Structured onboarding that introduces casino in week one, not week five, is critical. First-session casino exposure, even light-touch, significantly improves 90-day retention across both verticals.

Retention mechanics also need to outlast the tournament itself. A World Cup loyalty campaign that ends after the final leaves players with nothing to stay for.

The programme needs a natural handover, such as seasonal sports, ongoing casino promotions and VIP pathways.

LTV modelling should reflect the reality that a player who touches both verticals in their first 30 days is worth multiples of a single-vertical player. That should be driving investment decisions, not treated as a nice-to-have.

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21

It’s worth broadening the frame. It’s equally about an operator’s existing, loyal casino audience, who arrive at a World Cup window expecting something seasonal and new players, maybe coming from competitors or sportsbook-only platforms to join a promotion.

Short-term promotional content that performs well during the tournament doesn’t have to disappear. A limited-edition live table can remain in the lobby after the promotion ends reverting to its standard theme and continuing to serve as a player favorite.

That thinking is what separates acquisition-focused operators from retention-focused ones. The FIFA World Cup creates the spike. Smart content strategy and a well-structured lobby are what convert that spike into sustained engagement across all the verticals.

The post Roundtable – More than just a Match: How Can Online Casinos Benefit from Increased FIFA World Cup Traffic appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.