DATA.BET recorded 168% turnover growth in its virtual sports vertical in 2025, according to the company’s annual Sportsbook Report, published on 29 April 2026. Active users on the vertical rose 68% year-on-year, while GGR increased 21% and the number of available virtual sports events expanded by 74%.
Virtual Sports Performance
The figures cover DATA.BET’s full virtual sports portfolio and reflect what the company describes as consistent growth across all key metrics. Serhii Kurdas, Head of Virtual Sports at DATA.BET, attributed the performance to broader content availability, product improvements, and higher player engagement.
Interest in virtual sports continues to grow steadily, and the current performance strongly reflects this trend. Our results for 2025 show consistent growth across all key metrics compared to the previous year, confirming its increasing relevance for operators.
Kurdas identified bet settlement speed as the primary driver of player retention. Virtual sports settle within seconds, creating a fast cycle that sustains engagement at a higher rate than standard bet types. The variety of simulated formats on offer, covering football, racing, and other disciplines, reinforces that retention by allowing players to move between experiences within a single session.
The 74% expansion in available events in 2025 extended coverage significantly, and DATA.BET said the combination of volume and product quality was responsible for shifting player attention toward the vertical, particularly during periods when live sports calendars were thinner. The company noted that this served as a turning point in the virtual sports category’s popularity among its partner base.
Wider Report Context
The virtual sports figures sit inside a broader set of results across DATA.BET’s three verticals: esports, sports, and virtual sports. Across all verticals, overall partner turnover grew 23% year-on-year in 2025. The report also identified low-tier esports events as an increasingly important and underleveraged revenue source, with that segment generating up to 30% of total esports profit across all tiers combined.
Regulatory pressure features prominently in the report’s analysis of the 2025 operating environment. Tax increases across key European markets, with the UK cited as the most affected, pushed operators to reassess content strategies. DATA.BET’s view is that broader event coverage and regional localisation, rather than reliance on flagship tournaments, represent the more durable commercial answer to that pressure. The UK confirmed major gambling tax increases in late 2025, with online casino rates rising to 40% and sports betting to 25%.
Yurii Berest, CEO of DATA.BET, framed the report as a transparency exercise tied directly to the company’s commercial model.
We believe that transparency builds trust and moves the whole industry forward. At DATA.BET, transparency sits at the core of everything we do, and this report reflects that. With the addition of sports betting last year, we want to show how our product continues to evolve and improve, and how we help operators grow their revenue through betting that works.
DATA.BET is a Limassol-based technology provider of sportsbook solutions covering esports, sports, and virtual sports. The company launched its sports betting vertical in June 2025 and serves operators across European and Latin American markets. The full 2026 Sportsbook Report is available to download via the company’s website.
The report also includes a practical guide for casino operators evaluating a sportsbook launch in 2026, with DATA.BET noting that players active across both casino and sports betting deliver higher lifetime value than single-product users. For operators navigating the multi-vertical integration question, the company’s platform partnership model is one route that has produced measurable results in comparable contexts. For Q1 2026 esports performance, the company reported GGR growth of 91.4% and turnover growth of 70.6% year-on-year, with niche disciplines delivering a 245% increase in profit — a trajectory that points to continued vertical expansion heading into the remainder of 2026.
Source: DATA.BET
