Kévin Brocard is the Director of Product for Sportsbook at GiG combining over a decade of iGaming strategy with a background as a sports trader. Sportsbook product guru by day, unapologetic football fanatic by night, in this exclusive interview with G&M in Spanish, Kevin covers this World Cup from the sweet spot where cutting-edge betting technology meets pure, unadulterated passion for the beautiful game.
1. From a product perspective, what makes the World Cup such a unique opportunity compared to domestic leagues?
Historically speaking, the World Cup—and the Euros to a lesser extent—is usually the only time when everyone is actually excited to watch national teams play. The media hype around the tournament starts early, well before the end of the domestic leagues, and the once-in-four-years opportunity builds the narrative on its own. It provides strong momentum for a general audience to experience the emotions of sports betting, often for the first time, making the tournament the ultimate acquisition funnel for operators. The public is solely focused on this particular competition—even Wimbledon will barely clash with it this year considering the time zones.
From a product standpoint, it serves as a real-condition, final-boss benchmark against all the lessons learned, new features introduced, and technical improvements made to face ultimate activity peaks. Every four years, standards are redefined, shaping the general approach until the next tournament. For a B2B provider like GiG, a major event like a World Cup brings a peak of activity to launch new operators, starting six to nine months prior to the opening ceremony. “Intense” is likely the best word to describe it!
2. How do you balance building for global appeal during a World Cup while still catering to local market nuances?
Our approach is straightforward: global partner, local champion. SportX bridges the best of both worlds with a competitive, extensive, global core offering, while empowering our partners with the right localization tools—such as event highlighting, market ordering, and localized banners—to adapt to their specific local player bases.
3. Where do you see the biggest gap between what operators think players want during the World Cup and what they actually engage with?
The biggest gap lies in how operators lose focus on what truly matters to the player—a quick and easy way to find and place bets. Instead, they overflow them with statistics, data, and custom interfaces. A memorable experience doesn’t come from an endless set of marketing widgets or unfamiliar UX, but from how efficiently transactions are processed. Strong basics always beat over-hype.
4. How important is simplicity during a World Cup, and do you sometimes feel the industry overcomplicates the player experience?
Innovation at GiG is about making complex things feel easy. Delivering efficient and simple user journeys is everything, and it remains a key pillar in our product strategy.
That said, a World Cup isn’t the right time to experiment; there is absolutely no room for mistakes during peak hours. The game plan is to execute on the most robust, simplified version of our product to date. We see a four-year cycle where the World Cup is, counter-intuitively, the end of it. A new cycle starts right after this intense acquisition phase, when your clients need to maximize player retention. Our job is to strip away the noise so that even a once-a-year bettor feels like an expert within five seconds of opening the SportX platform.
5. Everyone knows a World Cup is perfect for bringing users in, but the real test is keeping them there. From a product perspective, what strategies can operators use to maintain that post-tournament momentum and maximize long-term ROI?
In commercial terms, think of the World Cup as the showroom, and regular football leagues and their associated betting experiences as the actual purchase.
The key here is to ensure an extensive discovery of the sports product via targeted marketing moves, while taking the opportunity to cross-sell over different verticals, like slots, casino, or poker, if the context allows.
Another approach is to ensure your outright and long-term offerings are attractive enough for players to place a bet that won’t get settled until next spring. You can then try to re-engage them on related selections at a later time. This positioning must happen during the World Cup itself, ensuring the quieter times following the final don’t trigger full player disengagement.
6. And finally, how do SportX and the GiG Ecosystem specifically prepare operators for a tournament of this scale, and what makes them a ‘game-changer’ compared to what was available in previous World Cups?
SportX and the GiG Ecosystem are game-changers because of DataX and LogicX. We provide an event-driven architecture that allows operators to be incredibly agile. Our scalability isn’t just about handling traffic spikes; it’s about giving operators the power to iterate on their UI and promotions in real time without downtime. We aren’t just giving them a sportsbook; we’re giving them their sportsbook, backed by a full suite of iGaming solutions capable of handling the world’s biggest stage.
