Trader's View | World Cup 2026: How to manage risk when the local nation plays

In this edition, Dmitri Agapov, Head of Trading at Genius Sports shares how automation is enabling traders to unlock margin growth while still staying competitive on price this summer.

Whether you operate in Brazil, the UK, South Africa or the United States, if the local nation is in action, your customers will get behind the national team. For operators, the World Cup is a big opportunity to acquire and retain customers. This requires engaging pre-match and in-play products that meet today’s users’ demands for betbuilders and micro-betting.

At the last Euros, Entain received a record number of betbuilders on the final, while Paddy Power saw stakes on player markets grow by 100% (vs the previous World Cup). Throw in promotional offers (like odds boosts and Super Sub), and your liabilities will be spread across more market-types than ever.

With exposure spread across so many markets, tracking your risk position on the big World Cup games is easier said than done. Previously, operators adjusted odds based on liabilities, while balancing the price differentiation required to attract recreational customers.

Today, on such a high turnover betting event, this is only possible with automation. It’s why many trading teams are exploring automated risk tools to ensure liability-driven pricing at the 2026 World Cup. For the early Edgeadopters, data shows a 22% increase on existing football margin.

With just a month to go until June 11’s opening game, a manual setup risks leaving revenues untapped. Here’s why automated pricing tools are a no-brainer.

The local nation bias

With every game on TV, this betting volume from recreational bettors is unparalleled at international tournaments. Barclays estimated $35 billion was wagered globally at Qatar 2022. The liabilities you’re taking on are exponentially larger than normal.

But betting on the local nation also creates a very different risk profile.

On a typical Saturday during the domestic season, betting is often spread across accas combining multiple different competitions and fixtures. When the local nation plays at an international tournament, huge liabilities are concentrated into a small number of matches.

But now, they’re now spread across 100s of different markets.

For example, when England play, local customers will bet heavily pre-match and in-play on England to win, Harry Kane to have 2+ Shots from Outside the Box, and England to Score in the Next Ten Minutes, and combine these selections into betbuilders.

These markets and selections are not independent. If Kane scores, England are more likely to win, and the massive exposure you’ve built up could all come in at once.

At such scale, totally manual liability management cannot assess the “big-picture” impact of liabilities across the entire fixture. This is where automation works best.

When one-sided betting behaviour occurs, Edge, our automated liability-driven odds solution, adjusts odds across hundreds of related markets. Liabilities are not pooled, and you get an efficient, personalised price for your sportsbook.

You still control the pricing strategy (you can even set a margin threshold) – and you get optimised, instant odds adjustments that reflect your own real-time liabilities and bets across pre-match and in-play.

Maximise margin on every game

Risk management tools like limits, delays and suspensions are useful.  They protect your sportsbook from sharp activity, and reduce the impact of one-sided exposure in the short term.

But use them over-zealously at the World Cup, and they’ll limit your profits. This is especially true when the local nation plays. As kick-off approaches, and liabilities start building, turning to limits is an easy way to mitigate a nightmare scenario.

But ultimately, these limits and suspensions are barriers to getting a bet down, disrupt the user experience and reduce your possible upside on the biggest event of the year. After making plenty of effort to acquire and re-engage customers, you risk delivering a sub-par in-play product when it matters most.

With Edge, you’ll gain incremental margin and still grow customer engagement, without adding any extra risk. This means you can accept more bets with the confidence that your liabilities are balanced and that you’re locking-in margin on every fixture.

While vast betting activity will be recreational at the World Cup, sharp money is still a factor. Player profiling remains integral to keep your sportsbook profitable.

The next wave of automation helps you better identify this activity, so you can adopt an intelligent risk strategy, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, which also keeps turnover flowing in a sustained way.

Balancing acquisition & profitability

For all operators, new customer acquisition is as crucial as trading performance at the World Cup. You’re balancing price boosts, free bet promotions and price differentiation, while still trying to protect your trading margin.

It’s possible to win across all these metrics. Take a Spanish operator pricing Spain vs Uruguay in the group stage.

• You want to boost Spain to Win before kick-off. Edge works with you, not against you. You set a target margin to protect, and you get maximum performance within that threshold.
• You want to adjust overrounds during the game. Edge operates entirely within the margin threshold you set, giving you total control – without requiring manual monitoring of every in-play bet.
• What about price competition? When liabilities build on markets like Spain to Win and Yamal First Goalscorer, Edge makes incremental odds adjustments. Your customers don’t see a sudden lurch in the odds. Edge simply keeps your odds optimised.

By anchoring pricing to your customer behaviour, Edge delivers a protected baseline. You still own the trading strategy and suspension settings – but Edge delivers results at speed and scale, with the real-time decision making required to manage all markets at once, especially in-play.

If you want margin to be lower on a specific fixture, that’s easy to apply. You get the benefits of price differentiation, while locking-in the maximum possible margin within set parameters.

And it’s proven to work. For one top European operator, Edge increased trading margin by 22% across the Premier League over a full season.

To summarise, one-sided betting on the local nation is an opportunity. With the support of automated tools like Edge, it’s a chance to grow margin and customer engagement at the same time.

Want to learn more about Edge? Read how it helped Admiral thrive amid rising tax rates.