Fanatics Picks the Gulf for Its First Steps Abroad

Key Points

• Fanatics has skipped past every other international market and landed straight in Abu Dhabi, joining forces with Momentum Group in a joint venture that swallows the UAE operator’s lottery, sportsbook and iGaming licences whole.
• The regulator didn’t just nod along. GCGRA actually signed off on the change of control before either company said a word publicly, which tells you how far along this deal already was.
• Fanatics isn’t walking into this broke or untested. Its gaming arm rocketed from $300 million in revenue in 2024 to $2 billion in 2025, and that curve hasn’t flattened yet.

After eight years of building a US gambling business, Fanatics finally crossed a border. Momentum Group, the only company licensed to run a lottery, sportsbook and casino under one roof in the UAE, is now its partner of choice. The joint venture, announced on 29 June 2026 out of Abu Dhabi, hands Fanatics a stake in something it could never have built from scratch this fast: a fully licensed footprint in one of the tightest gambling jurisdictions on earth.

Nobody disclosed the ownership split. Nobody mentioned a dollar figure either. What the companies did confirm is that the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority had already approved the change in control for the licensed entities involved, covering the UAE Lottery and the betting platform Play971, before the news ever reached a press release. That sequencing matters; regulators in the Gulf rarely move that fast unless the groundwork has been laid for months.

Why Momentum, Specifically?

Momentum Group secured the UAE Lottery tender back in July 2024, running it through a subsidiary called The Game LLC. The lottery itself didn’t open until December that year. From there, the company kept stacking firsts: Play971 launched in November 2025 as the UAE’s first fully licensed iGaming product, starting with casino games alone before sports and race betting joined the lineup this June.

Conor Grant, president of Fanatics Gaming, put it plainly when explaining the choice of partner. “We have always said we would only expand internationally when we found the right market and the right partner,” he said. “The UAE offers both a newly regulated market with a long-term vision for commercial gaming, and Momentum, a trusted local operator with deep market knowledge and a shared commitment to building responsibly.” Scott Burton, Momentum’s chief operating officer, framed the fit from the other direction: combining the company’s regional grounding with what he called Fanatics’ “global product capability” as a partnership built to last alongside a market still finding its shape.

Momentum’s commercial director for iGaming, Philippa Bowland, had already flagged the early traction Play971 was seeing, telling iGaming Business at the time of the sports betting launch that player response gave the business confidence in both the opportunity ahead and the role the platform could play in shaping the category. That groundwork, modest as it sounds, appears to be exactly what drew Fanatics in.

A Revenue Curve That Explains the Urgency

Fanatics didn’t arrive in the Gulf as a company testing whether gambling could work for it. Its gaming revenue grew from $300 million in 2024 to $2 billion in 2025, and that growth carried into the first half of 2026 as the operator closed the gap on the industry’s established names. A business expanding that fast domestically eventually runs out of new US states to chase, and the Middle East offered something rarer: a market still being written, rather than one already carved up by incumbents.

That comes at the right time as Fanatics has been working on yet another plan. In early June, the firm announced the development of a regional base in Qatar meant to be a platform for its operations in the Middle East. This was received warmly by the head of the government communications office in Qatar, Sheikh Jassim bin Mansour bin Jabor Al Thani, who pointed out that the development was an indication of the confidence that international industry players have in Qatar’s environment and geographic location. The partnership is expected to serve in promoting the sporting community of Qatar while creating ties with the international sporting industry. Less than two months after the announcement, the deal was made public in the UAE.

What Does the Joint Venture Actually Cover?

This isn’t a narrow licensing arrangement bolted onto one product line. The deal includes everything Momentum operates at the moment through the GCGRA license, lottery, sportsbook, iGaming, as well as content sites related to them, with both agreeing to work on technological and product development together. Both Grant and Burton emphasised responsible gambling as one of the key issues for them, rather than something that can be considered after, which seems to make sense in the regulatory environment they operate in.

Neither side has named a product timeline. Whatever changes Play971 sees, whether that’s new betting markets, a rebrand, or simply Fanatics’ technology layered underneath the existing platform, will likely surface gradually rather than all at once.

Expert Analysis

Strip away the diplomatic phrasing and what’s left is a company with momentum it can’t easily replicate at home, buying its way into a market it couldn’t enter any other way. The UAE doesn’t hand out gambling licences casually, and Fanatics knows it; partnering with the only operator who already holds every relevant one was never really optional, it was the only door available. Whether that bet pays off depends less on Fanatics’ US playbook and more on how comfortably American-style sports betting technology folds into a culturally distinct, tightly regulated Gulf market. Early signs, a fast regulatory approval and a partner with three years of regional firsts behind it, suggest Fanatics did its homework before knocking.