How U.S. Sports Betting Is Being Structured Around Athletes

In American sports today, the jersey matters—but the name on the back matters more. The shift in fan allegiance from teams to individual athletes is not just reshaping fandom. It’s rewriting the economics of sports betting. A new wave of personalization is sweeping through U.S. sportsbooks, with player prop bets—wagers based on individual performances—moving from the fringes to the forefront. As platforms evolve to meet the demand, micro-markets and real-time betting innovations are becoming the new norm.

For decades, sports loyalty in America was rooted in city pride and franchise history. But younger fans, raised in the era of fantasy sports and social media, are more likely to follow players than teams. That shift is driving change across the multibillion-dollar U.S. betting industry. “Sport is now more people-focused,” says Karl Danzer, SVP of Odds Services at Sportradar. “Team sports are more personality-led. Not all organizations like that—it hands players the power—but it plays a big role in how people bet.”

Danzer believes this transformation is especially pronounced in the United States, where drafts, trades, and short player tenures make team loyalty less stable. Fans are instead rallying behind athletes with big stats and even bigger online followings.

Micro-Markets, Macro Impact

Sportradar is investing heavily in micro-betting and player-focused markets. These small, fast bets—like how many points a player scores in a quarter—cater to a mobile-first, attention-fragmented audience.

“How we build markets will be, on the one hand, around the specific individual and then with the characteristics of the actual player,” Danzer explains. “That would appeal to people who follow a specific player.” This strategy isn’t just about engagement. It’s about profit. “It is easier to convert someone to sports betting if they are following a player,” he says. And sportsbooks are capitalizing.

Tom Daniel, SVP of trading at Huddle, points to hard numbers backing the trend.

“Player props represent approximately 70%–75% of all bets placed in [same game parlay] categories,” Daniel says. “Six of the top seven most popular SGP markets are focused on individual performances.”

In baseball, where player performance data has long been a fan obsession, the trend is especially strong. But the same logic is spreading across football, basketball, and beyond—fueled by the habits of fantasy sports players who already think in terms of individual metrics. “Many of today’s sports bettors will have played DFS (daily fantasy sports),” Daniel notes. “This naturally crosses over into betting on the actual metrics.”

Not Just an American Story Anymore

While this movement has deep roots in the U.S., it’s now influencing European markets too. “We’re seeing a growing demand for player-specific markets in Europe,” Daniel says. Social media, combined with global star power, is pushing even traditional football fans toward player-led betting.

Marc Thomas of Algosport notes that major tournaments like the 2024 Euros and Copa América accelerated this shift, making in-play bet builders—often centered on players—more popular than pre-game bets. “Players are becoming brands in their own right,” Thomas says. “We allow end-users to truly turn their opinions on a particular match or player into a bet that can test their knowledge.”

The next frontier isn’t just more data—it’s smarter data.

Tomash Devenishek, CEO of Kero Sports, envisions a future where sportsbooks use real-time AI to offer hyper-personalized bets based on in-game trends. “Imagine a scenario where a player scores 14 points in four minutes,” he says. “The betting platform instantly offers a prop like ‘Will he score over 25 this half?’”

This style of contextual micro-betting reduces friction for bettors and increases engagement. But scaling it requires automation, not guesswork. “Manual approaches won’t keep up,” Devenishek adds. “Automation and AI are the only scalable solution.”
Caution Behind the Curve Still, the shift to player-first betting is not without risks.

“It’s not good enough to try and fudge the pricing with a priori guesses at correlations anymore,” warns Daniel. The complexity of SGPs, where multiple bets interact, demands robust back-end systems that can simulate thousands of game outcomes in real-time.

Risk management also becomes trickier. Systems must detect and account for overlapping bets that could result in large payouts. And while the logic behind player-focused engagement is strong, the long-term data on user behavior is still emerging. Danzer cautions against assuming player props are a silver bullet for customer acquisition:

Advertising in the right environment and understanding the fans still drives performance.

The Bottom Line

What began as a fantasy sports quirk has become a sportsbook strategy. In the U.S., where the athlete is often bigger than the team, this transformation was perhaps inevitable. Operators are embracing it—for both engagement and economics. “Operators like parlays; margins are better,” says Danzer. “And this is where player props are interesting.”

The scoreboard still matters. But in the age of personalized content and instant gratification, who’s making the play—and how—is becoming just as important as the final score. As technology, culture, and fan habits converge, American sports betting isn’t just adapting to new rules. It’s playing an entirely different game.