The World Cup has generated a 65 percent increase in sports betting in Colombia compared with the 2018 edition.
The president of the country’s Coljuegos gambling regulator, César Augusto Valencia, is quoted by El Tiempo as saying that during November and December of this year, sports betting will drive revenues up sharply.
At the end of last year, Colombia had 5.4m registered players, said Coljuegos, but this year the numbers have gone up. August saw seven million players having registered with Coljuegos’ 17 licensed companies, a rise of 1.6m on 2021.
As well as the increase in numbers, players are staking more. Payments platform PayU Latam said that the average daily spend of the Colombian market before the World Cup was $649,000. After the competition started, the number rose by 84 per cent to $1.19m.