Ontarian Perspective: Report Indicates the Best Sports to Bet on in 2024
Sports betting is all the rage in Canada these days. It’s especially popular here in Ontario, where online sportsbooks are able to compete for your business. They present a vast selection of bets on a wide range of sporting events, with alluring promotions to bring in newbies. According to recent reports from Ontario’s regulators, it’s working.
In the first year of a legal and licensed market (April 4, 2022 – March 31, 2023), operators reported $35.5 billion in total wagers. From that figure, $1.4 billion converts to gaming revenue. That is, the amount of money operators won from the province’s 1.65 million active players. It’s not all sports betting revenue, though.
The regulatory body, iGaming Ontario (iGO), publishes these data reports. However, they do not differentiate between types of gaming. There are two major categories – Sports and Casino. The bulk of total wagers and revenue comes from these two groups. We evaluate Ontario’s favorite casino games in another post. Today, we’ll look closer at the sports betting side of the market.
Best Sports to Bet On According to Ontarians
Every sports bettor has their own idea of what constitutes a great opportunity. A popular sport, a favorite type of wager, a preferred odds margin perhaps. These may or may not be the safest sports bets on the market, but they are popular, nonetheless.
I could speculate that basketball is the best sport because there are so many matches to bet on at any given time; that the NFL is best because the match-ups are easier to predict. But these are all biased opinions, relative to the owner’s personal experiences.
The truth is, only an exceptional handicapper can tell you what’s best from day to day, week to week, and their assessments are far from 100% accurate. So, while we can’t provide you with a magical answer (we’d be rich, sipping fruity cocktails on a remote island if we could!), we can provide you with a statistical analysis of what sports Ontario’s gamblers believe to be the worthiest of wagering.
The following data comes directly from the regulator’s 2022-23 iGaming revenue report. It details not all sports, but the five that garner the highest cumulative wagers.
Holla’ for Hoops – Basketball Ranks #1
Were you expecting Ice Hockey in this position? If it were a popularity contest for following and/or watching sports, the NHL would reign supreme. When it comes to betting, Ontarians are far more inclined to drop a dime on the hard court.
Data gathered by provincial regulators shows that the largest portion of sportsbook wagers go toward basketball. In fact, basketball betting beat out the second favorite sport to bet on by nearly double. Basketball wagers account for 29% of all sporting bets in the province.
Second Place Rank Goes to Soccer
With an estimated 20 million fans in Canada alone, Soccer ranks as the second-most-watched sport in the country, and the second-most popular to wager on in Ontario. Having a decent home team doesn’t hurt either. The Canada vs Mexico World Cup Qualifier in November 2021 garnered 1.15 million viewers and an untold number of new fans.
The iGO report shows 15% of all sports bets in the first year of legal iGaming went to Soccer. The matches, scores, individual player performances – a lot of Ontarians trust in their own predictions enough to risk money on it.
Football Fanatics – NFL and CFL Take #3 Spot
There’s something about football that draws fans like bees to nectar. The big hits, the amazing athleticism, incredible comeback wins – Americans love it! Here in Canada, we’re more prone to bet on it than watch it. CFL and NFL football have a fan base, mind you, but it’s not in the top 10 as far as viewership goes. And yet it ranks third on the list of favorite sports to bet on.
Football accounts for 13% of all wagers from April 2022 to March 2023. That doesn’t sound all that special until you stop to consider the length of a season. The CFL regular season runs 5 months, June through October, with a championship series in November. The NFL is similar, with its regular season running 5 months from September to January, then a few weeks of Playoffs leading to the Super Bowl.
Ahhh, the Super Bowl. That’s where betting on football gains its momentum. The regulator’s report may not get into specifics, but there’s no doubt that the Super Bowl draws a crazy amount of bets. In fact, Ontario’s Q4 data (January-March 2023) shows nearly 40% of all wagers for the year occurred in this period, with average player spending increasing from just $70 per month on the year, to $174 per month in Q4.
Hockey and Baseball Round Out the Top 5
Two of the most popular sports in Canada in terms of fan base come in at the #4 and #5 positions for bettors. No doubt NHL wagers get a lot of attention because we as Canadians believe so much in our teams (or at least our ability to predict their performance, for better or worse).
This is where we have to be careful, though. Gambling and fandom don’t mix very well. Never let your love for the Calgary Flames influence your betting habits! Perhaps it’s this knowledge that pushes hockey down into the #4 spot, despite the NHL’s immense popularity in the Great White North.
The report shows 9% of revenue goes to bets on hockey games. That’s just a hair above our second favorite sport. Baseball slides into 5th position with a very close margin of 8%.
All told the top 5 best sports to bet on in Ontario make up 74% of total wagers. That leaves 26% to be divvied up between all other sports. Throughout the province’s 30+ legally licensed online sportsbooks, there are plenty of other sporting events on that list.
