Sports betting has picked up in popularity a ton over the last few years and that correlates with more states legalizing wagering. And what league do sports bettors like betting on the most? That would be the National Football League, by quite a large margin.
That certainly is the case at New York sportsbooks.
We know that the Super Bowl is the most bet event of the year. We also know that the NFL is the most popular sports league in the United States. But we don’t know which fanbase has the most sports bettors.
EmpireStakes.com – your source for NY sportsbook promos - utilized Statista’s 2022 “Attitudes Toward Sports Betting” survey of NFL fans with 1,020 respondents to find who currently are the NFL fanbases who claim to be a “sports betting user.” (Note that this is just a sample size of NFL fans who claimed to be a fan of a specific NFL team. The percentage represents how many people are sports bettors out of the sample).
Top Fanbases for NFL Betting Interest
In a recent survey, Statista asked sports fans of different NFL teams if they consider themselves sports bettors. Here are the results:
How New York Fanbases Rated as Bettors
In this sample of more than 1,000 sports bettors, it was the New York Giants (13%) that had the largest percentage of sports bettors. Right behind them were the Buffalo Bills (11%). That makes a lot of sense as New York sports betting apps recently became legalized (January 2022) and fans can wager on their favorite team in the NFL right from their phones. It also doesn’t hurt that both the Giants and the Bills made the postseason last year, which certainly increases the amount of enthusiasm for potential bettors.
The other New York team came in at No. 6 as 5% of Jets fans said that they were betting on sports. That is a bit lower than the other two teams from New York and it could be because their team has just had less success over the last few years.
Fans no doubt will be following the Jets, Giants and Bills playoff chances all season long. The Bills earlier this year as the NFL’s No. 2 most obsessed fanbase.
Retail sports betting officially became legal in July of 2019 in the state of New York. Since then, the Jets have a combined record of 20-46. It will be fascinating to see if we see a rise in sports betting from fans in 2023 after the addition of Aaron Rodgers and a significant increase in the Jets’ Super Bowl odds.
With so much optimism surrounding the Jets going into the 2023 season, it wouldn’t be a shock at all to see them inside the top five of this list over the next few months. For the first time in a decade, the Jets are viewed as potential Super Bowl contenders and that should lead fans of the Jets to place more bets on their favorite team this year. The first week of the season should be a great test, especially the Monday Night Football game of Bills at Jets. At BetRivers NY, the Bills were favored by 1.5 points in mid-July.
It’s important to remember that this sample size is relatively small, but it’s clear that fans of football teams in New York love betting on the NFL and sports in general. And with more and more states legalizing sports betting, it won’t be a shock to see the numbers rise across the board for all NFL teams.
