Flutter reveals its approach to World Cup underdog odds

• Flutter set odds on more than 1,200 players across all 48 World Cup teams, covering over 50,000 bets in total.
• Around 80 Flutter colleagues volunteered to research individual squads, coordinated by Principal Football Trader Jason Murphy.
• Cape Verde’s 1000/1 pre-tournament odds became one of Flutter’s biggest payouts after its run to the knockout stage.

Flutter has explained how it set betting odds for every player across all 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup, covering more than 1,200 players and over 50,000 individual bets.

The operator turned to around 80 volunteer colleagues from across the business to research squads it knew little about, especially the tournament’s 16 newcomers.

A group-wide effort

The World Cup grew from 32 teams to 48 this year, bringing in newcomers such as Uzbekistan and returning nations like Haiti, which had not qualified in half a century. To offer betting markets on every team and player, Flutter needed information on squads far outside the usual football spotlight.

A small group of specialists could not cover that much ground alone. Flutter put out an open call across the company, and around 80 colleagues volunteered, some picking teams they had a personal connection to, others assigned at random.

Each followed the same basic approach: work out how well a team was likely to do overall, then figure out which players would contribute most to that.

Jason Murphy, Principal Football Trader at Flutter UK and Ireland, led the project and said:

“We always acknowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know. Even with England.”

Working with little data

For lesser-known squads, the first job was simply working out who would play.

Barney Spooner, a FanDuel colleague, researched Cape Verde by going through its qualifying matches one by one, since there was almost no footage of the team to study. Where gaps remained, he used typical figures for players in similar positions, based on Flutter’s own data.

Spooner said:

“The most important thing was projecting who was going to be playing, and who would get the lion’s share of the minutes.”

Nine of the eleven players Spooner expected to start did start Cape Verde’s opening match against Spain, a goalless draw in which Flutter said Spain had 74% possession and 27 shots without scoring. Cape Verde went on to become the first World Cup newcomer to reach the knockout stage since Slovakia in 2010, before losing 3-2 to holders Argentina in extra time.

Cape Verde had started the tournament at 1000/1 to win it outright. As the team kept winning, that price turned into one of Flutter’s biggest potential payouts of the tournament, worth tens of millions worldwide, the operator said.

Almost a fifth of those bets came from Irish customers, drawn in by Dublin-born League of Ireland player Roberto “Pico” Lopes, who joined the squad after a LinkedIn message he initially ignored.

Iran posed a different challenge. Its squad, drawn largely from a domestic league that gets little international coverage, changed shortly before the tournament. Flutter said the job was made harder still by the country’s ongoing conflict with the United States, a World Cup host nation.

Sam Turnbull, the Flutter colleague who researched the team, is half-Iranian and has followed Iranian football for years. He said:

“I wouldn’t know many of the players if they passed me in the street.”

Even so, Turnbull noticed that defender Ramin Rezaeian was playing in a more attacking role than usual, so Flutter shortened his odds to score or take a shot. Rezaeian went on to score twice.

A similar spot came up with Uruguay’s Maximiliano Araújo, who plays as a defender for his club, Sporting CP, but takes a more attacking role for his country. Flutter adjusted its odds accordingly, and he finished the tournament with two goals, though Uruguay was eliminated in the group stage.

When underdogs pay off

Murphy said that, in the end, getting the numbers right still comes down to people:

“The price is the final piece. If you get the price right, the results will look after themselves.”

The work sits alongside a wider World Cup push across Flutter’s portfolio. The same UK and Ireland team also sets odds for Betnacional, following Flutter’s recent Brazil platform integration ahead of the tournament.

In the US, FanDuel has built its own generosity program for the World Cup. Fanatics Sportsbook, by contrast, has built its campaign around American fan culture rather than match odds.

With Spain and Argentina due to meet in Sunday’s final at MetLife Stadium, Flutter’s account offers a rare look at how a major operator handles a much bigger tournament.

Pooling staff from across the business, rather than relying only on a handful of specialists, could become a model other sportsbooks look to copy as World Cups keep growing.