Key Points
- 84% of NFL bettors placed at least one live bet during 2025/26, despite only 34% saying they prefer live wagering.
- 78% of bettors plan to keep wagering after their favourite team is eliminated from contention.
- NFL handle growth has effectively stalled at $29.5 billion for 2026, as prediction markets divert an estimated $1.3 billion in potential state tax revenue.
NFL Bettors Keep Saying One Thing and Doing Another
But what an NFL bettor intends to do in August is not likely to withstand the rigours of an NFL game in action. Pre-game betting is the preferred method among NFL bettors in 2026/27, according to 41% of those polled, while live betting came in second place at 34%. However, when asked about what they did during the previous season, there appeared to be a starkly contrasting picture. The majority of NFL bettors engaged in live betting during the 2025/26 season at 84%, which is twice as many as their stated preference for the betting method. The Optimove Insights 2026/27 NFL Betting Intentions Report, conducted via a survey of 926 US adults who have placed bets on NFL games during the previous season, is all about this contrast.
What makes this more interesting is the direction of travel. The prior season’s Optimove report found that 75% of bettors made live wagers during the 2025/26 season, down from 85% the season before. The rebound to 84% in 2026 suggests live betting was never in retreat; it was simply being underreported by bettors describing their own habits before a ball had been kicked.
The Season Rewrites the Plan
Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove, captured the dynamic precisely. “Intentions collected in August describe a starting position, not a season,” he said. “By week eleven, a bettor’s team may be eliminated from contention, they may be making live bets, and their weekly budget may already be spent. The sportsbook still needs real-time insights to know which of those is true.”
This statement will have more meaning when combined with the second Optimove report released in August 2026 on 136 million real NFL bets made in the previous season. 69% of bettors thought they would make pre-game bets, but 84% of them ended up doing so, proving that pre-game betting is the natural starting point for live engagement. Pre-game attracts bettors; live keeps them engaged. Sportsbook operators who treat both of these actions as distinct methods of acquisition for their business are wrong about how one bettor acts throughout the 18-week-long season.
Team Loyalty Opens the Door, Not the Season
One of the sharper findings in the report concerns what keeps bettors engaged once their team exits the picture. Ninety per cent of respondents said they were certain or very likely to wager on games involving their favourite team. Yet 78% said they would certainly or very likely keep betting even after that team was eliminated from contention. Team loyalty is the entry point; it is not the retention mechanism, and the distinction matters enormously for how operators plan their mid-season marketing.
Individual player performance was cited as the biggest betting motivation by 45% of respondents, while team loyalty and excitement added to watching games both landed at 43%. Operator promotions ranked lower, at 36%. Sixty per cent of bettors had already placed a wager on the coming season, including Super Bowl futures, before Week One kicked off. For this audience, the NFL calendar does not start when the season does.
Weekly Budgets, Not Season Caps, Drive Real Spending
The spending data complicates any simple picture of what an NFL bettor is worth across a season. Eighty-one per cent of respondents said they had set a betting budget, with weekly budgeting being the most frequently used method at 41%, ahead of a full-season budget at 24% and a total spending cap at 16%. Weekly resets mean weekly decisions, and each new game slate becomes a fresh consideration rather than an automatic extension of the previous one.
Planned season spending clustered around two distinct bands: 33% expected to spend around $250 across the season, while 31% planned to spend $500 or more. On individual wager size, the spread was considerably wider, and the report noted that single-wager size and total season spend often diverge significantly. A bettor placing one occasional large wager looks nothing like someone betting smaller amounts every week, even if their end-of-season total is similar, making both metrics necessary for operators trying to segment their audience accurately.
Platform loyalty sits on similarly shaky ground. Sixty-four per cent of respondents said they expect to use two or more sportsbooks during the season, while 16% plan to use at least three. App usability topped the list of reasons for choosing an operator at 59%, ahead of easy payouts at 43%. Tellingly, 47% said difficulty using the app was also the primary reason they would leave one. The margin between winning and losing a bettor can be as thin as a slow-loading screen.
The Bigger Fight No Survey Fully Captures
Optimove’s results fit into an industry facing a threat much bigger than changing bettor preferences. According to the American Gaming Association report dated 4 September 2026, Americans will legally bet $29.5 billion in the NFL season of 2026 using commercial sportsbooks, compared to the amount of $29.4 billion in the previous year. Such a static number represents the first time there has been no increase in the bet handle for the NFL since the legalisation of sports betting in the USA in 2018.
From last September through May, the amount wagered with US sportsbooks grew by just 4%, compared with 14% over the same period the previous year. The deceleration is sharp, and a detail buried in the Optimove data sharpens it further: 84% of NFL bettors surveyed were already aware of prediction markets, while 60% said they planned to trade or buy event contracts during the year. The audience that regulated sportsbooks are fighting hardest to retain is actively exploring the platforms pulling handle away from them.
The AGA estimated that more than $1.3 billion in potential state gaming tax revenue has been diverted to prediction markets since 2025. Bill Miller, AGA president and CEO, described the products as “dangerously misleading consumers by marketing sports wagers as an investment, rather than what it is: entertainment,” adding that platforms like Kalshi allow users, “including teenagers and students, to place bets without the protections, oversight, and accountability that the legal market provides.” Industry analysts now forecast that NFL trading volume on prediction markets could reach $36.8 billion this season, a figure that would already exceed the entire regulated sportsbook handle.
This is where the NFL took steps to ensure that the regulated side of the equation was strengthened before all of this happened. The league made commercial deals of several years with DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics Betting and Gaming before the start of the 2026 season and granted the three operators rights to the use of the NFL’s brand identity, data, and marketing rights for important games like the Super Bowl and NFL Draft.
Expert Analysis: The Survey Gap Is an Industry Confession
We think the 50-percentage-point gap between stated live betting preference and actual participation reveals something the industry is reluctant to say clearly. Bettors do not underreport live betting because they dislike it. They underreport it because live betting carries a social implication they would rather avoid: that their gambling decisions are reactive, emotional, and shaped by whatever just happened on the field. Pre-game betting sounds disciplined. Live betting sounds like something you do because your team just gave up a fumble and you convinced yourself you knew what was coming next.
The industry reads this gap as a marketing opportunity, and Yakuel’s own framing around AI-driven personalisation confirms that Optimove sees it the same way. But we would argue the gap is also a regulatory blind spot. If bettors systematically underreport their most impulsive betting format in structured surveys, then responsible gambling assessments built on self-reported preference data are starting from a flawed baseline. The 84% live betting participation rate is not a pleasant surprise for operators; it is a sign that how bettors describe their own behaviour and what they actually do under game conditions are two different things entirely. Any policy or product built on the former is already working with incomplete information.
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