As prize draws attract growing interest in the UK, Adam Shaw is betting on a multi-sport model to stand apart with The Big Leagues.
The Big Leagues went live last week with its new prize draw platform, targeted specifically towards sports fans in the UK. The launch followed a £500,000 ($662,077) seed funding raise.
The new platform offers both paid prize draw entries to win unique sports-related rewards, as well as free-to-play prediction games.
Its founder, Adam Shaw, previously served as Flutter Entertainment’s international director and chief revenue officer at Superbet.
Drawing on his extensive betting industry experience, Shaw sees an opportunity to capitalise on the growing popularity of prize draws in the UK while offering a differentiated alternative to the established market leaders.
“I wanted to find something in the UK that I thought was growing and that I thought had meaningful consumer demand behind it,” he tells iGB. “I spent a bit of time looking at the various different parts of the market, and it was pretty clear to me that prize draws had both of those things.”
Building a destination for sports fans
However, the rising popularity of prize draws in the UK has also intensified competition in the sector.
In a white paper from earlier this year, the consultancy Rokker said the UK prize draw sector was worth £1.3 billion in annual revenue, with over 400 active operators in the market.
Shaw feels The Big Leagues can offer a distinct proposition that encompasses multiple sports and provide a go-to space for fans.
“Having come out of sports betting, I know that most people are interested in more than one sport, and so if you’ve got one website where you’re able to win prizes across all of those different things, it’s just going to be somewhere that people are going to want to go,” he explains.
“I think the sports companies, they’ve all gone into one specific sport, and I think they’ve all hit the ceiling to some degree. And so I wanted to be the company that branches across all those different areas.”
This appeal to sports fans is particularly apparent in the prizes that The Big Leagues is offering, with a focus on premium experience-led prizes over predominantly merchandise-based rewards.
“It’s more aspirational than some of the sites out there are currently running,” says Shaw. “We’re offering proper bucket list stuff for people.
“A trip to the Masters, Champions League hospitality and a box at Cheltenham [Festival] for you and your mates and stuff that’s really worth winning, rather than winning a football shirt for this weekend. Not that there’s not a place for that, but we’ve kind of taken a different angle on the way that we’re thinking about doing it, in that we want to go to the more aspirational side.”
How will The Big Leagues acquire players?
Shaw is drawing on his extensive betting industry experience to use free-to-play prediction games as an audience-building tool.
“The free-to-play part of it, I’ve kind of learned that playbook from gambling,” he comments. “I know that it works, and it’s something we’ve got that’s totally differentiated against anyone else in the prize draw sector.
“I think it’s a really interesting way of building an audience. A lot of people are using Facebook to build their audiences, or media brands to help build their audiences. I’ve done that previously with free-to-play, so why not here?”
In the press release announcing its launch, The Big Leagues says it is “actively seeking” partnerships with brands, sports organisations and charities.
This also extends to content creators, Shaw says, with The Big Leagues able to offer mutually beneficial partnerships.
“I think one of the things that we get from being a sports-based brand is that we can go and play in the sports zone, let’s say,” he says. “And so content creators, influencers, sports clubs to some degree, people in and around sport, we’re going to be able to do deals to get access to their audiences, and give them the kind of services that we have.
“If people have got a sports audience that they’re trying to either engage or monetise, we’ve got a pretty good way of doing that, whether it’s through the free-to-play games, where we can engage customers in a bunch of different ways through their brands, or through the prize draws, which obviously we can help people monetise their audiences through that.”
Targeting the top
Shaw’s ambition is to establish The Big Leagues as the leading sports prize draw platform in the UK and a mass-market alternative to traditional gambling and fantasy sports.
“I’d love it to be the number one sports prize draw website,” he says. “It’s kind of as easy as that. We need to overtake all of the people that are doing it well in their individual sports.
“I’d love to have a huge community of people playing our free-to-play games. We’ve got a decent community of people that play them every week already, and I’d love for it to be a household name in that respect, as a kind of third alternative, let’s say, to gambling and fantasy sports. I think it’s somewhere in the middle of those two things, and I think we can be a kind of interesting alternative, let’s say.
“And if it was a proper mass-market household name in that respect, it’d be wonderful.”
The Big Leagues would welcome regulation
As prize draws have surged in prominence over recent times, so has the conversation around their regulatory status.
Prize draw competitions in the UK operate within a complex regulatory framework, with their classification under gambling and lottery laws depending on their structure and how prizes are awarded.
A Voluntary Code of Good Practice for prize draws was introduced last year, although Rokker’s white paper claimed less than 20% of the sector’s estimated active operators had signed up.
The Big Leagues, however, has signed the voluntary code and is part of the newly established Prize Competition Council (PCC) trade body.
Shaw says the operator is doing “everything by the book”, explaining: “We’ve taken the highest path that we can take from a regulatory perspective as it stands today in the UK.”
He is pushing for clearer regulation of the sector, although he warned against the overly restrictive measures that many believe have been inflicted upon the UK’s traditional gambling sector.
“I’d be pretty happy if they came in and put proper regulation in place. I think it’d be good for the market, good for the certainty and give the guardrails,” Shaw added.
“There’s clearly demand for this thing, so having some sensible regulation would be great.
“That said, I don’t want it to go down the gambling path too hard because I think that’s probably gone too far now at this point. But sensible regulation would be good. I don’t see it as a risk, particularly.”