Zona de Azar USA – Betting on Sports America: “Fan Engagement, Integrity are Keys to Success”

USA.- April 26th 2019 www.zonadeazar.com Morten Andersen – one of just five kicking specialists enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame – opened his Thursday morning keynote at the Betting on Sports America conference with a question.

“Everyone knows what this is, right?” the former all-time leading scorer in league history asked, holding up a football. “Do you know why it’s called a football? Because it’s a foot long.”

Andersen, wearing his gold Hall of Fame jacket, said the leather “instrument of destruction” had been very good to him. He described his introduction to the game almost as a fluke. On his 17th birthday, Anderson’s parents asked him if he’d like to go to a football game.

“I said I’d love to,” he said, “thinking it was soccer. It was just a pile of bodies, and every once in a while, a stretcher would come in and carry a guy out.

“I said, ‘I don’t want any part of this.’”

Morten Andersen

Once he learned that there were players in the game who did nothing but kick, however, Andersen was all in. And when his first kick flew high and true, “I had 80 new friends and it was welcome to America.”

Andersen’s appearance was sponsored by Danish iGaming developer Better Collective, who “aim to make sports betting and gambling “entertaining, transparent, and fair,” according to their marketing copy.

Andersen, who was born in Denmark, emphasized integrity, diligence, and will during his talk, saying that those qualities were what got him back on the NFL field after 20 months without a contract, and urged attendees to utilize the same qualities in their sports betting businesses.

“If your dreams don’t scare you,” he said, “they’re not big enough.”

Kicking on his own in a public park during his hiatus, he said, was what ultimately enabled him to sign his last NFL contract. He broke the all-time NFL scoring record in 2006 against the Dallas Cowboys.

“I’m not wearing this gold jacket without those 20 months in that park,” he said. “What I had to understand was to embrace the suck. You improve as a human being, or as a company, when your back’s against the wall.”

Anderson played with five NFL teams between 1982 and 2007 and had been the all-time leading scorer for two of those franchises – New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons – when he retired. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017.

He alluded to being something of an amateur in the sports betting world, but related a larger lesson drawn from his experiences in pro football.

“Is this an exciting time (in sports betting)? Is this the wild, wild west? I don’t know, I’m not an expert,” Anderson said. “But I do know this; if we engage the fan and the bettor, we have a better chance to have a sustaining business model for a long time. We have to be responsible as operators.”

As for the NFL, Andersen said that he thinks there will eventually be an international NFL team, but was hesitant to say anything explicit about the league’s ongoing reluctance toward embracing sports betting.

“I think it’s going to happen,” he said in response to a question from the audience. “The NFL is known for being very conservative. It’s been my employer for 25 years, so I’m not going to stand up here and bash the NFL by any means. But I think they’re going to come around to the fact that it’s undeniable. They’re already looking at things.”

Andersen said that the NBA’s “all-in” model could function as a “good” framework for the NFL to potentially follow. NFL owners are interested in creating revenue, he said, and if the model works, “they’ll go. Or they’ll miss out on a ton of revenue.”

“It’s just too big a market to ignore.”

Editó: @MaiaDigital (Twitter) www.zonadeazar.com