BetMGM CEO Adam Greenblatt on NFL season, market insights and more

BetMGM’s CEO goes on record to address expectations and his thoughts on a winning bets tax

With college football season and the NFL finally underway, it’s the busiest time of the year for sportsbooks. All of the summer time spent improving their apps, figuring out promo offers and developing better user experiences come to fruition and operators battle it out for market share in the U.S. marketplace.

I recently sat down for a one-on-one interview with BetMGM CEO Adam Greenblatt to discuss a variety of topics, including new enhancements and markets for the BetMGM app, what a successful football season looks like and his thoughts on the rescinded DraftKings proposal for taxing winning bettors in four high-tax states.

Q: What are you most excited about this coming football season?

Greenblatt: This summer has been so productive and the experience in hand is so markedly better than it’s ever been that now we’re in the top tier without a doubt. What I’m excited about is seeing the impact of that in the BetMGM world. For us, it’s not only about the experience in hand, it’s about how we bring it together.

Who is BetMGM? BetMGM was the sportsbook that was born in Las Vegas and is the premium experience that is rooted in hospitality in entertainment. You play with BetMGM, you earn points, unlock suites at MGM resorts, stay at one of Mariott’s 30 brands or 10,000 properties worldwide. These are things that only BetMGM brings and is connecting that digital, in-hand experience with the things that are synonymous with a Vegas experience.

New for the season is our Second Chance promotion. Get your wager back in cash if your player doesn’t score the first TD. We’ve got our first bet offer, which is up to $1,500 if your first bet loses and get your wagering back in [bonus] bets. But [I’m excited by] the intuitiveness and richness of our betting experience powered by Angstrom. We have some new, only at BetMGM things, which have always been synonymous with our gaming business, but we can now bring those to bear in our sports betting side, which I’m really excited about.

[BetMGM is] the only book that offers a seamless journey in and out of Nevada, where your money, know-your-customer [KYC] credentials follow you, aimed to make it as seamless an experience as possible. The journey [to get here] has been difficult. There have been product considerations and regulatory considerations. Nevada from a regulatory standard is the gold standard and is really specific about its requirements. 

There have been two important deliveries this summer. One was bringing the app that our players know and love in all of our BetMGM states into Vegas. One was folding the Nevada business into our single account framework. And we’ve done those both successfully. You talk about a way to drive top-of-funnel customer acquisition that’s efficient and brand-reinforcing, I’m very excited about that.

Q: What does a successful NFL season look like?

Greenblatt: The most important thing is that players love our product and that players love being a part of what we bring. I really want to see our players enjoying the product in hand and the unique-to-BetMGM markets hit. We’ve moved from a tabbed bet slip to a linear bet slip and we’ve reorganized the flow of the bet slip. I’d like to see that helping to increase the percentage of parlays that our players bet. I want to see players enjoying our bet-tracking experience. You can build a Same Game Parlay and then check the performance of that SGP in your betting app, so you don’t have to go to your companion sports information app. Everything is there. And it won’t be live for the beginning of the season, but coming in some weeks, bet stats – all of the information you need to feel like you can establish an opinion and make a wager, all in the app. Success looks like more time in the product, more bets, higher SGP percentage, higher parlay percentage. Those other things are outputs.

Do I expect to see an acceleration in revenues from our first half? Yes.

Do I expect to see an improvement in sports betting market share? Yes.

This will be, in substance, the first football season for some of the newer entrants in this competitive market and they’ll have everything to prove. The backdrop of that is some of the smaller operators exiting the market at an accelerated rate. Without question in my 20 years of doing this, this is the most competitive market I’ve seen. Products are moving forward at breakneck speed, marketing intensity is what it is, brand strength for us and some of our competitors is formidable, but I know that we at BetMGM have never been set up better from a competitive standpoint.

Q: We’re six years into legalization, how has the market been compared to your expectations?

Greenblatt: I’m delighted with how it’s gone. The starting point is, ‘Is there a market and are players receptive to the category?’ And what we’ve seen is that it’s been a runaway success. Just wagering on the NFL this season, the estimate from the American Gaming Association is $35 billion. That’s a huge number, and we haven’t even started talking about basketball, which as a product category is pretty close to football. The market size has been a pleasant surprise. I moved my family from Europe for this because it’s kind of what I was expecting it to be, but the market has been even stronger. The other qualitative surprises have been the take up of parlays and SGPs. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the work that we, the operator community have done in the area of responsible gambling – investment in tools, education and resources.

What I’ve been disappointed by is the prevailing narrative and cynicism against what we’re trying to do here. The anchor of ROGA – the Responsible Online Gaming Association – is something I’m very excited about, which is something called the universal self-exclusion program. If you self-exclude from BetMGM, you self-exclude from the entire market. Now, to our disappointment, which is linked to that: We need to do more, [all operators] against the illegal market because all of these things – the success of generating meaningful of tax revenue, but there’s still a ton of leakage to the illegal markets. It’s not just tax considerations – no player protections, no tools to support sustainable, responsible fun play, no protection of the underage or vulnerable and no consideration for self-excluded players. And so together, the industry and our regulators and our lawmakers need to recognize that it’s in our collective interest to clamp down on the illegal market – as tough as we can be that’s the right mark.

Q: Is there concern that the scandals have stalled momentum with legalization for iGaming and sports betting?

Greenblatt: I think the scandals will have had an impact on some perspectives, but my view on this is actually the contrary. For me, the scandals highlight something that I think has always been there but has not been visible. And for me, this is the power and positive externality of a regulated sports betting market. We have positive reporting obligations on anything that looks a bit funny, we have to talk about it. For me, that’s the power of it, because sustainability of the sector requires that there is integrity in the underlying games – without it, we have no business. I do think that for those who don’t appreciate that, it will have introduced some degree of friction in sports. I think in iGaming the issues are different because really concerns are about cannibalization of land-based and responsible gaming.

Q: What were your overall thoughts on the DraftKings proposal for winning tax?

Greenblatt: I’m very comfortable to be on the record with my position here, which is really about player centricity. I think there are examples internationally where market tax levies have been introduced but they haven’t really stuck. 

The best example is in Germany, where the government introduced a 5% turnover tax that initially all of the operators were outraged and pushed the tax to consumers across the board. Then, the market leader in Germany figured out that the constraint was the gross win margin in their sportsbook. They really leaned into parlay wagers meaningfully and were able to take back the cost to their customers because they were getting it from somewhere else and their market share improved by percentage points and meaningfully so, cementing their leadership position. 

I think the industry has proven itself to be extremely resilient in the face of real tax challenges and regulatory challenges. The answer where we are today is certainly not to let our players pay.