In the early months of 2020, sports betting was looking to have a banner year, as more regions opened up to the activity and better educated punters started looking at all the options in front of them. Covid-19 kind of ruined that, but as Becky Liggero Fontana learned in her conversation with Jesper Søgaard, CEO of Better Collective, esports came to save the day.

Liggero Fontana began by asking about how the year took a turn for the worse. “Actually as you say, numbers look good, and we actually, especially in January and February, had a very good start of the year with really record activity on our sites and in the business as a whole,” he said. “And we started seeing sort of the gradual effect of Covid-19 end of February on the NDC sites, for the new depositing customers with our partners. But it wasn’t until mid-March where we saw the complete cancellation of sports globally, where we could see a significant drop in the business. But we’ve just had so much momentum already, so as you say the numbers actually came out quite well. And we also gave an update then on April, with our Q1 report, stating that we had revenue of 4.6 million euros for April, which is down 17 percent compared to April last year.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGDZfQLhL3IVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Jesper Søgaard discusses how big a role esports played in the last 3 months (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGDZfQLhL3I)

But things are slowly starting to turn around again, and Søgaard is optimistic. “So of course a drop, and the organic growth was minus 41 percent, so there we could really see the impact, but then but again there were no sports, and now this weekend we saw the German Bundesliga, so it’s actually, you know I’m cautiously optimistic right now, because it seems like we’re over the worst of this crisis,” he said. “As you mentioned here in Copenhagen, our headquarters, most employees are now back in the office. We have of course also offices in the U.S. where that’s not the case, but I think at least now I’m cautiously optimistic about the future development.”