In this article, Eliane Nunes, Business Development Consultant for Kiron Interactive, explores how virtual sports help operators maintain player engagement between major live sporting events, filling the gaps left by the real-world sports calendar.
By Monday morning, the football world will be back to normal. The Brazilian league, the state championships, the regional leagues, all of it returns and carries on. But there is one thing that does not come back: the World Cup. It ends on Sunday, and then not again for four years.
Someone will point out that next year there is a Women’s World Cup, and that is true. Unfortunately, it still does not generate the same movement as the men’s tournament. So the void that opens up after Sunday remains.
A distinction is worth making, one that people who work with betting understand well. The World Cup is not the most important sporting event that exists. If we look at sport as a whole, the Olympics mobilize more disciplines and more countries. But when it comes to football, nothing comes close to a World Cup final. That is why the void that follows it is so specific. It is not a lack of games. It is a lack of that game.
Here I need to be precise, because it is easy to mix up two different things. Virtual sport does not replace the World Cup. Nothing replaces the World Cup within four years. That gap is unique, and it is meant to be that way. What the end of the World Cup does is lay bare a truth that holds all year round: the wish to have fun placing a small bet on a sporting event does not always line up with there being a live event actually taking place.
The live calendar, however full it may be, does not keep pace with someone who wants to play. There is the gap between one round and the next, the day with no relevant match, the quieter week. In those moments, the person who wanted to follow an event and bet simply does not find one worth their time. It is precisely this mismatch, between the fan’s interest and the real world’s schedule, that virtual sport solves. It offers an entertainment option when there is no live event available, and not only after a World Cup. The World Cup ending is just the moment when that mismatch becomes easier to see.
And here I will go beyond the basics, because many people reduce virtual sport to an acronym and stop there. The RNG (Random Number Generator), certified by an independent laboratory, is the foundation. It is what guarantees that every result is random, auditable, and within the rules of each jurisdiction. In Brazil’s case, it needs to pass through the approval of the SPA/MF. But what defines the value of the vertical is not only how the result is generated. It is how it reaches the operator and the player. And that has as much to do with technical consistency as with the quality of the experience, something I follow closely in my work with Kiron Interactive.
In the case of Kiron, and certainly of other virtual providers, these games can arrive in two ways. The first is in the casino lobby, through an aggregator or direct integration with the PAM platform, where it works with the session logic that the casino player already knows. The second, and this is where the vertical truly shines, is integration via data feed inside a sportsbook platform. In that format, the virtual enters as just another sport, with odds, markets, favourites and underdogs, exactly where the football bettor already is. That flexibility of delivery is what lets the operator choose where the product fits best with its own base.
That difference matters. In the casino lobby, the virtual competes with slots and crash. In the sportsbook, it speaks to the habit of someone who was betting on the World Cup right up until Sunday. For the operator, it is a continuation of behaviour, not a new product that has to be taught from scratch.
And that is where the most interesting part lies. The technology is the means. What interests me is the behaviour. The bettor is not looking only for a result, they are looking for the anticipation. They want to analyze, choose a market, place a bet and follow it through to the final whistle. The virtual preserves that entire dynamic, with the difference that the next event is not days away. It is a few minutes away. And the final whistle does not take ninety minutes to arrive. It is the best of both worlds: the dynamic of a sports bet, practically on demand.
And it does not live on football alone. Football is the main entry point, all the more so in Brazil, and that makes complete sense, because it is where the greatest demand is. Even so, a mature portfolio goes beyond competitions inspired by the big leagues and includes horse racing, dog racing, basketball and other disciplines running throughout the day. It means more recurrence without depending on the real world’s schedule.
In the end, that is the maturity of the segment. Virtual sports have no pretension of competing with real events like the World Cup, the Brazilian league or the NBA. They exist so that the bettor’s experience is not held hostage by the calendar, whether in the gap between two rounds or in the four years that separate one World Cup from the next.
(*) Eliane Nunes is Head of Revenue & Commercial Growth at ASA (Atucha Strategic Advisory) and, in that role, works as a business development consultant for Kiron Interactive.