The UK Has Become the NFL’s Fastest-Growing Betting Market Outside the US
When I started covering NFL betting from a UK perspective nine years ago, finding another British punter who could explain the difference between a spread and a moneyline was a genuine challenge. That has changed so fast the numbers barely feel real. Entain — the company behind Ladbrokes and Coral — reported that the number of British and Irish customers betting on the NFL grew by 65% year on year during the 2024/25 season. Not 6.5%. Sixty-five percent.
That figure did not emerge in isolation. The total number of NFL bets placed through Entain’s UK brands rose 60% year on year, while the aggregate sum wagered climbed 46%. The gap between bet count growth and staking growth tells its own story: new bettors are placing frequent, smaller-stake wagers rather than fewer large ones. This is the profile of a market in its growth phase, populated by curious fans discovering NFL betting for the first time rather than established punters shifting allocation from other sports.
Year-on-Year Growth: Bettors, Stakes, and Bet Volume
Greg Ferris, Entain’s Managing Director for Sports, framed it plainly: the NFL has become truly international, with UK and Irish fans betting not only on London fixtures but on primetime US games throughout the week. His statement points to a crucial detail in the growth data. The 65% bettor increase is not confined to the three or four London game weekends. It stretches across the entire season, driven by Thursday Night, Sunday Night, and Monday Night Football — games that air at times accessible to UK audiences willing to stay up past midnight.
Staking on London Games specifically jumped 51% compared to 2023, which makes these fixtures the highest-intensity engagement point on the UK NFL calendar. But the broader season-long growth outpaced London-specific growth, indicating that the International Series is a gateway drug: fans discover the NFL through a London game, then continue betting throughout the regular season.
Player props drove the sharpest spike. Stakes on anytime touchdown scorer markets rose 90% year on year, making it the fastest-growing NFL market at UK sportsbooks. The appeal is intuitive — it mirrors the first goalscorer market that UK football bettors already understand — and it requires minimal knowledge of American football strategy to participate. You pick a player, you watch the game, you know whether your bet landed the moment the ball crosses the goal line.
Who Bets on the NFL in Britain: Age, Gender, Device
The Gambling Commission’s Q1 2025 data shows that 15% of men and 4% of women in the UK bet on sport. Those figures cover all sports, not just the NFL, but they establish the gender framework within which NFL betting operates. The NFL audience in Britain skews younger and more male than the football betting population, though the gap is narrowing as London Games and mainstream media coverage attract a broader demographic.
Device data is unambiguous. Ninety-five percent of online bets placed in the UK are made from home, and among the 18—24 age group, 76% use a mobile phone as their primary betting device. For NFL bettors, this mobile-first behaviour has specific implications. The typical UK NFL bet is placed on a phone, during or just before a game, often as a same game parlay or anytime touchdown scorer prop. The betting session is short — ten to fifteen minutes of building a slip, placing the bet, and returning to watching the broadcast.
This pattern explains why UK sportsbooks have invested heavily in NFL-specific user interface features over the past two seasons. Bet builders — the UK equivalent of the SGP product — are now prominently featured on NFL game pages, with pre-built popular selections that reduce the friction of constructing a multi-leg bet on a sport the bettor may only partly understand. The result is higher conversion from browsing to betting, which directly feeds the volume growth numbers Entain and others are reporting.
American Football vs Soccer in UK Betting
Football — soccer — remains the dominant sport in UK betting by a vast margin. The Gambling Commission reports that football generates approximately £1.1 billion in gross gaming yield, more than all other sports combined. The NFL is nowhere near that figure, and likely will not approach it within the next decade. But the trajectory matters more than the absolute number.
Football betting in the UK is a mature market growing at low single-digit percentages. The NFL is growing at 50—65% annually from a small base. If that pace continues even at a moderated rate — say, 25—30% annual growth over the next three to four years — the NFL will become the second or third most wagered-upon sport in the UK, competing with horse racing and tennis for position behind football. That is a remarkable shift for a sport that had negligible UK betting volume as recently as 2018.
The competitive dynamics are also different. Football betting in the UK is hyper-efficient: thousands of sophisticated bettors, mature modelling infrastructure, and tight margins. The NFL market in Britain is still developing, which means odds are occasionally soft, lines are slower to adjust, and the pool of sharp UK NFL bettors is small enough that one informed punter can extract value that would not exist in the Premier League market. For anyone serious about finding edges, the London Games betting analysis illustrates how these market inefficiencies manifest around the highest-profile UK fixtures.
