The World Cup is driving a surge in first-time and casual bettors, pushing acquisition budgets and platforms to their limits. But technical infrastructure is only part of the challenge, writes Lauren Harrison.
For most operators the bigger test is turning tournament traffic into long-term loyalty.
And according to Symplify’s Chief Sales Officer, Christoffer Feldt-Sørensen, it won’t be the operators who acquire the most customers that emerge as winners, but those that act on real-time signals to improve engagement before opportunities disappear.
From the biggest CRM trends shaping the industry to why treating every World Cup bettor the same is one of the most common and costly mistakes operators can make, in this exclusive iGF interview with iGF Head of Content Curtis Roach, Christoffer draws on his expertise to explore how real-time behavioural analysis and predictive engagement are changing the CRM game.
Curtis began by asking:
The World Cup 2026 is expected to generate a huge influx of new and returning players. But many operators struggle to convert tournament traffic into long-term value. What CRM strategies are proving most effective at turning short-term acquisition spikes into sustainable player retention?
“The first thing operators need to accept is that not every player who arrives during a tournament is the same.
“Some of them were always going to stay. They are experienced bettors who came for the football and will move seamlessly to the domestic leagues once the final whistle blows. Others came specifically for this tournament and have no obvious next interest.
“Treating both groups identically is one of the most common and costly mistakes we see.
“It over-services the players who were always going to stay and under-serves the ones quietly slipping away. Some of that post-tournament drop-off gets filed under ordinary churn.
“It is worth resisting that framing, because some of it is more predictable than normal churn. And predictable churn is preventable churn.
“The operators doing this well are segmenting their tournament acquisition in real time.
“They’re watching which matches each player bets on, whether they are following the tournament broadly or narrowly tracking one team, whether they engage through the group stage or only appear for the big fixtures.
“That behaviour, visible during the tournament itself, tells you a great deal about who is likely to stay and who is quietly at risk.
“A player betting narrowly, following only their own country, with no sign of broader interest, is more likely event-driven than someone engaging with the tournament as a whole.
“For the players with natural next interests, the job is bridging, not rescuing. Connect them to what comes after the World Cup while they are still engaged.
“A player who bets on the opening weekend of domestic football is no longer a tournament sign-up – they’re an active player.
“That transition happens in the weeks around the end of the tournament, and the CRM team watching the data in real time can make it happen. The one waiting for the monthly report cannot.
“For the genuinely event-driven player, timing is everything.
“The moment a supported team is knocked out is one of the strongest retention opportunities the whole tournament offers, and most operators miss it because they are not set up to act in the moment.
“Reach them a fortnight later, once they have drifted, and you are too late.
“The operators who win a tournament are not the ones with the most sign-ups during it. They are the ones who read their players honestly and reached the at-risk ones before they slipped away.”
Personalisation has become a major differentiator in player engagement, yet many operators still rely on broad segmentation and generic campaigns. How can CRM teams leverage automation, AI and real-time data to deliver truly individualised player experiences at scale during high-volume events like the World Cup?
“The gap between what operators know about their players and what they actually do with that knowledge is still enormous. Most have the data. The problem is latency. By the time insights are processed and a campaign goes out, the window has often passed.
“The true value is in seeing it early. The behaviour that signals churn is usually visible during the tournament itself. Falling session frequency, narrowing interests or a player who was active every day during the group stage but now appears only every few days are all early warning signs. At that point the player is still reachable. Once they have disappeared altogether, you’ve moved into expensive win-back territory.
“True personalisation during a high-volume event like the World Cup is not about sending more messages. It is about letting player behaviour trigger the message rather than the campaign calendar.
“During a tournament, relevance beats planning.
“An underdog pulls off a surprise result and overnight everyone wants to bet on them. Traffic spikes during a match, engagement moves, and the operators who act in that moment are the ones who win it.
“A player who is actively betting throughout the tournament is telling you something different from one who placed a bet on the opening weekend and has not been seen since.
“And a player whose session frequency is falling mid-tournament is telling you something else. The question is whether your system is built to react or simply to record.
“What we are seeing work well is micro-segmentation that updates continuously based on live behaviour, not static RFM groups built at the start of the month.
“During a tournament you might have a hundred distinct player states evolving simultaneously.
“The operators who build separate journey logic for each of those states, rather than one broad campaign for everyone, are the ones seeing meaningful retention lifts of 15 to 30 percent.
“AI handles the pattern recognition at a scale no human team can match. But the strategic decisions stay with the people: What signals matter, what actions to take, what the brand voice sounds like.
“The best results come when you let AI do the heavy lifting on data and free the team to focus on judgment.”
The modern player journey now spans sportsbooks, casino, mobile apps, social channels and multiple communication touchpoints. How important is having a unified CRM ecosystem? And what challenges do operators face when trying to create a seamless omnichannel experience?
“It’s not just important. It’s the difference between a player experience that feels coherent and one that feels like five different companies trying to reach the same person at the same time.
“We have all been on the receiving end of it: An email arrives, then an app push with the same message, then an SMS. Each one triggered by a different system, with no awareness of the others.
“That is not personalisation. That is clutter.
“The technical challenge is real, iGaming operators typically have player data spread across multiple platforms – and getting those systems to talk to each other in real time is genuinely difficult.
“Data fragmentation is probably the single biggest blocker to omnichannel CRM done properly. You cannot personalise a player journey if you only have a partial picture of who that player is.
“The operators getting this right have made one architectural decision above everything else: They treat the player profile as the single source of truth, and every system feeds into it rather than maintaining its own version.
“When a player shifts from sports betting to live casino, the CRM responds to that shift immediately. Not hours later when a batch sync runs. That level of responsiveness requires continuous data streaming, not periodic reporting.
“The compliance layer adds complexity too, particularly across multiple regulated markets. But we have always seen regulation as a design constraint rather than a blocker.
“Build the consent and data handling correctly from the start and omnichannel becomes easier, not harder.”
Beyond the World Cup, what major trends do you expect to shape the future of CRM over the next two- to three-years? Are we moving towards a world where predictive engagement and automated decision-making become the standard for player retention?
“Predictive engagement is already here. The question is how widely it becomes standard practice.
“Right now the operators at the front of the market are using AI to spot churn days or weeks before it happens, to identify high-value players before they reach traditional VIP thresholds, and to intervene on responsible gaming signals in real time.
“That is not the future; that is 2026. But it is still the minority doing it well.
“Over the next two- to three-years, I expect that gap to close, and the operators who have not invested in real-time data infrastructure will feel it commercially.
“The ones who built the capability early will have a meaningful and durable advantage, not because they have better ideas but because they can execute faster and more accurately than anyone relying on batch data and manual campaign builds.
“What I am most excited about is what happens when you combine real-time data with anticipatory intelligence, creating systems that do not just react to what a player is doing but predict what they are about to do and act accordingly. We are not fully there yet, but the direction is clear.
“The regulatory direction across Europe is clear: Operators need to identify and act on risk signals before harm occurs, not after a complaint is filed.
“The technology to do that exists today. The harder part is the cultural shift inside operators, moving from a promotional mindset to a stewardship mindset. That is where the industry still has genuine work to do.”
Editor’s Note:
Like many industry leaders, Christoffer makes the compelling case that retention–not acquisition–is where this year’s tournament will really be won or lost.
Operators focused solely on onboarding during the World Cup, rather than planning what comes next, risk giving away their advantage before the tournament is even over.
Christoffer posits a simple argument: Players arrive with different intentions and operators need to recognise those signals early and respond with the right value proposition, rather than treating every player the same.
Doing that depends on acting while those signals are still relevant.
Reducing latency within CRM processes, he argues, is what separates the operators delivering an engaging experience from those being left behind.
But latency isn’t the only issue. Data and team fragmentation also prevent operators from delivering a unified CRM journey. And, in Christoffer’s words, can mark the difference between “a player experience that feels coherent and one that feels like five different companies trying to reach the same person at the same time”.
So where is all this heading?
Christoffer believes that, as AI becomes more sophisticated, competitive advantage will increasingly belong to those operators who have invested in the infrastructure and capabilities to act on player behaviour in real time and leverage predictive engagement.
