Flutter and FanDuel talk World Cup scale on Huddle Up
Last week, Karol Corcoran, Managing Director of FanDuel Sportsbook, and Karen Lockwood, who leads Flutter's trading function and is the UK & Ireland’s Football Director, joined Joe Pompliano, host of the sports business newsletter Huddle Up, for a panel in New York on the business behind this summer's World Cup, alongside Boardroom CEO, Rich Kleiman.
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This piece was written by Joe Pompliano and first published in his 'Huddle Up' newsletter.
Winning The World Cup: The Sports Betting Opportunity
The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup is the biggest in history: 48 teams, 104 matches, 3 countries, 39 days. But FIFA’s decision to expand from 32 to 48 teams (and 64 to 104 matches as a result) also has an impact that extends far beyond scheduling.
Over the next few weeks, experts estimate that more than $60 billion globally will be wagered on this year’s World Cup — 2x more than what we saw in Qatar in 2022. Millions of bettors will enter the regulated market, and sportsbooks will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on promotions to compete for customers.
So to gear up for this all-out blitz, I hosted a panel in New York last week with executives from Flutter and FanDuel, as well as Boardroom CEO Rich Kleiman. Flutter is FanDuel’s parent company — traded on the NYSE under FLUT — and this was the perfect group because Karol Corcoran built FanDuel’s U.S. customer base, Karen Lockwood runs the company’s trading business (think: pricing, odds, etc.), and Kleiman offers a U.S.-based sports business perspective.
We covered a lot of topics in 30 minutes, including how FanDuel plans to retain customers who download multiple apps, why the company launched a social media-style feed, and how the trading team prepared to evaluate teams that have never even played in a World Cup before. But what really stood out to me was the pure scale of what Flutter/FanDuel is anticipating over the next few weeks.
During this year’s World Cup, 10 million customers will place bets on Flutter’s global portfolio of sportsbooks. The company will make 1.5 billion daily price changes and, at peak demand, will likely handle around 100,000 bets per minute.
