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The No. 1 U.S. sportsbook is still definitively leading the market, even after a quarterly earnings report that showed a sizable revenue hit during the 2024 NFL season.
Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of FanDuel, said late Wednesday that it posted a 14% increase in fourth-quarter revenue to $3.8 billion, and a 19% lift for the entire year to $14.05 billion. Net income swung from losses in 2023 to profits in 2024, with a $156 million gain for the fourth quarter and $162 million for the whole year.
Those financial results further confirmed recent monthly reports in key sports betting locales such as New York, Illinois, and New Jersey. Across those states, and in many others, FanDuel remains the clear market leader, controlling as much as 45% of revenue. Flutter said that more broadly, FanDuel is claiming 43% of U.S. sportsbook gross gaming revenue.
Football Impact
Like top challenger DraftKings, though, FanDuel was hurt somewhat in the most recent quarter from betting trends during the NFL season in which favorites won at a historically high rate. Flutter called the situation “the most customer-friendly NFL results in 20 years” and said it created a “significant adverse impact” on revenue.
Flutter previously downgraded its 2024 U.S. revenue guidance by $370 million due to the NFL trends, and the final year-end tally of $5.8 billion was indeed below prior projections of $6.05 billion to $6.25 billion.
Still, FanDuel’s established market power was more than sufficient to overcome that.
“The transitory nature of these results, which is part of operating a sportsbook, has no bearing on our long-term outlook,” Flutter CEO Peter Jackson said in an earnings call with analysts.
The continued strength of Flutter and FanDuel stands in sharp contrast to the ongoing struggles of ESPN Bet, which could lead to an early end of the $2 billion partnership between Penn Entertainment and the sports media giant.
Last month’s Super Bowl LIX was not part of the Flutter fourth-quarter earnings report. Nonetheless, the company said the NFL title game generated a FanDuel record $470 million in single-day betting handle, produced by three million active customers and 17.7 million bets.
That milestone mirrored one posted by DraftKings and emphasized the U.S. sports betting duopoly using Super Bowl LIX to enhance their market dominance.
