Alan Casey joins on episode 206 to talk about his horse racing odds platform AllSported. He also educates Ryan on some horse racing terms.
Ryan Knuppel:
Hey, hey, hey. What’s going on everybody? Ryan Knupple here, episode 206 of the New Sports Show. Man, we’re flying, getting up in the two hundreds here in episodes, so that’s awesome. Hope you all are doing well. Thank you for taking a few minutes and listening to this awesome show. Hey, first of all, how do you like my new background? I got a little sports background behind me. Finally, I don’t just have a white wall, so got some memorabilia, some cool things behind me. I’m talk in sports, so let’s get some sports behind me. Someday I’ll go through and talk through kind of what we have going on back here. But for now, enjoy the visuals, man. Today, I mean, as of this recording, it’s Thursday, September 7th, and that is N F L day. So happy N F L Day. Thursday night Football kicks off tonight. Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs. I’m super excited for that game and for the whole season to be here finally. Okay, but we’re not here to talk about N F L. We’re here to talk to another great professional in the industry as we always do. So today I have a special guest with me. I got Alan Casey of all supported. Alan, how are you my friend?
Alan Casey:
I’m great, Ryan. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Ryan Knuppel:
Love to have you. I’m excited you’re on. How are you doing, my friend? Are you doing well?
Alan Casey:
We’re doing well. We’re doing well. I know we’re not here to talk N F L, like you said, but I’m equally excited for the season to kick off tonight. And as a long suffering Jets fan, I’m 10 x more excited than I normally am. So it
Ryan Knuppel:
Could be year, it could be their year. I mean, there’s a lot of hype around the Jets and I think they’re going to have a good season. Aaron Rogers there for him, so that should be fun to watch. So props to you. Good luck with the season.
Alan Casey:
Thank you. Thank you.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s awesome. Well, Alan, I want to hear a little bit about yourself. Tell me a little bit about you, your career. We’ll get into all Sported here in a little bit, but I want to hear about your past and what led you up to where you’re today.
Alan Casey:
Yeah, sure. So I think basically a big, big sports fan, big sports player. I played every sport growing up and I played still playing the last 15 years in the top basketball league in Ireland. So that’s kind of what brought me to sports betting. I’ve kind of done a degree in accounting and I was looking at jobs and got an offer from Beac, a sports betting exchange along with a couple of others, and I thought, oh, well, if I have to go to accounting every day, I’d rather it be at a sports company where at least there might be some sports on in the background. So that’s where my career started off. I quickly got out of accounting and they moved me around that company a few different roles, but did a little bit of compliance, a little accounting, and then found my way to the commercial team where I ended up looking after all the main A p I players, so your big market makers, liquidity providers on the exchanges, so some of your biggest syndicates in the world.
So great exposure to some of the smartest people in the game. So I learned a lot from that. And then from there, so seven years there and I guess four years now with all supported, started off as a joint venture with fan technology, so I know I’ve been the news there again following, I think they were well taken over by Points BET and now moved again to Fanatics. So they stepped away when Points BET came in, and we’ve kind of moved to just a fully owned entity ourselves now in Ireland the last two years. So it’s been good fun, a good challenge, and things are starting to go well for us. So yeah, it’s great.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. Congrats on the great career so far. Lots to come still, I’m sure, but that’s amazing. Sounds like you’ve had some great experiences and so all sported. So let’s dive into that a little bit and talk about for those listening that may not know what all sported is and what you guys do, why don’t you give the, I guess, thousand foot elevator pitch view of what all sported is?
Alan Casey:
Yeah, so basically what we wanted to do, horse racing is a complex sport, mainly we’ve got rights holders to figure out. It’s a hard sport to price and model and to trade. So all sport is just based wants to simplify it for bookmakers to make it an easy product to take. So what we’ve got in our product is basically everything you need to offer horse racing to your customers, be it that the pre-race content, your tipping content, obviously your odds, your race day data, which is obviously very important, your race off, non-runners, jockey changes, et cetera, and then results. So it’s an all in one package. We’ve integrated, I guess all the main data providers, so that basically one a p i one integration, you can get everything you need.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. That’s really cool, man. You’re going to be a little out of my league is I don’t talk much horse racing on this show, so some of the terms I could be like Uhoh, what are we talking about here? But I’m a little bit versed, so just bear with me as I try to keep up with the problem talk. We go from there. Can you talk about some of the partners that you guys are working with currently at all?
Alan Casey:
Yeah, I think the biggest customer we’ve have on our books is Beltway, and they’ve kind of been a good case study. You’ll be aware of an American presence as well. So we kind of started off small with them in South African horse racing, just helping them, big international company, they’ve different feeds coming in from everywhere, but they needed a more localized product for South African market because they price horses a bit differently to I guess the UK market. So we were able to come in and give them a more localized product. They’ve seen, I guess, tremendous success with that product. So then we’ve kind of expanded what we do with them. We started in Greyhounds earlier on this year for all their worldwide sites, and again, I think they’re just having record month after record month. So we are expanding that relationship further and further. So that’s been really positive. We’ve a couple of others, great customers that have been with us from the beginning and I guess four years up and running, but I think the last year and a half has really seen go from strength to strength on having a customer like Tway come in and been able to prove ourselves there. Just showing, yeah, the product’s really good and we can speak with confidence now when we know the benefits we can bring to any customer looking, I guess, improve their horse racing product.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s cool. That’s awesome. So educate me a little bit here and the audience possibly here in the us. I hear the term fixed odds quite a bit in relation to horse racing betting. Explain that a little bit and maybe I guess how that’s different from some other type of odds and maybe some pros and cons of fixed odds, and especially as it relates to the us we hear that a lot around here.
Alan Casey:
So in the US you would be used to the power mutual wagering or the tote systems that are in existence all over the world, but I think fixed odds has been, I guess restricted in the us. So with your totes, obviously you’re betting blind into a pool, and then after it’s settled based on I guess how many people have waged on that horse and it’s just divided up and it does come back in and around the odds, but I guess you’re not betting in with any certainty into the odds. So fixed odds, the main benefits is what price you’re getting. Also, you can, with a sport like horse racing, it’s important to see where the money’s moving. N F L big thing, there’s big big line movement. The sharp money in Vegas is moving the line this way, and that can be a great indicator as to what might happen on the pitch that night.
Horse racing’s the exact same. You see market moves late is I guess when a lot of the sharp money is down, but also you can follow the market. So having fixed odds would offer that kind of extra perspective and an interest in layer as you’re seeing a dynamic market moving. I think that would be the major benefit to adding fixed odds racing for the US is just because with a customer base who’s already very aware of how markets move, it’d just be a more compelling thing. People like you talking on shows, you could say this horse was 16 to one, now it’s four to one for the Kentucky Derby based on what’s happened today. So it just adds more talking points and makes it easier to understand a casual better.
Ryan Knuppel:
Very cool, very cool. So horse racing in general, what’s the interest level from a betting side in horse racing? I mean, compare it to an N F L or an N B A or a soccer? I mean, I think it’s a popular thing to bet on. I don’t bet on it personally, but I also know, let’s say from a content side, we put up a lot of content when we put up horse racing content, we get a lot of eyeballs on that content. And so to speak a little bit how horse racing fits in from an interest level on a bet on the betting side.
Alan Casey:
Yeah. Well, I think from a European perspective, and particularly in the UK and Ireland, horse racing was the lifeblood of bookmakers for years. It’s only recently that football or soccer has kind of overtaken it. So it’s still number two sport by a long way from everything else for the kind of UK Irish and European customers, Australia, big sport. But even in the US you’ve had Kentucky Derby, well over a hundred years horse racing and horse race betting has been long around for such a long time. I think it’s an engaging sport to bet on. I think the fact that you’re making a pick and you get to watch it play out and it kind of gives you that kind of feeling, oh, I got that one right. And it’s like people can come up with their own, you can come up with your own way, making picks you can own, can have your own opinion, and then you can I guess back it and then enjoy it when you’re right. So I think it’s one of the oldest betting sports around, I mean, you can’t have horse racing without betting. And I think that’s why it kind of appeals to the wider audience, someone who’s never been to a horse race before. They’ll go to the racetrack, they can pick on their favorite name, pick on favorite colors, and they can get as much enjoyment out of it As a season pro.
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Ryan Knuppel:
That might be, I always like to take a quote from the show and put it up. That might be the quote I take. You can’t have horse racing without betting. I love that quote, but seriously, it really drives the sport, right?
Alan Casey:
It is. And I think that people have lost sight of that over the years. And I think in the UK at the minute, there’s big back and forth around affordability checks, but even in Ireland, horse racing is like, it’s a multi-billion euro industry for the country. So I mean, because breeding horses all the rest and none of that exists without sports betting. And yes, it should be done responsibly, and it also, the commercial models need to be fair so that everybody in the game is benefiting. And that’s one of the main goals of all Sported is to have this compliant product, making it easy for Sportsbook to adopt because costs will keep going up, keep going up. It’s harder to price. There’s a lot of sophisticated customers now you have ARBs, you’ve all these things going in that makes it a harder product to offer. But we want to make it simple. We want to get money back to rights holders because then that feeds back to tracks to owners, to trainers, stable staff. It’s a great sport. People saying it’s in decline, but it’s been around for so long. But hopefully with products like ours and just I think with people who actually want to see the game do well, that we can see the sport thrive for many years to come.
Ryan Knuppel:
Amazing. Well, you transitioned me perfectly. I wanted to transition back into all sported and talk a little bit about you guys and where you’re headed. So what does the future look like for all Sported? What types of things do you have in the works and where you guys headed from a company side?
Alan Casey:
Yeah, so the big thing for us has been, we’ve now integrated, I guess the two main horse racing providers in Europe would be the Press Association and s I s. They’re kind of the main race day data or your official data suppliers. So we’re integrating both of their products. So we have racing post pre-race content, so all your tipping stuff, your predictors, the line by line comment on horses. So we’ve kind of taken out the integration pan for someone to offer horse racing, and then also then our odds, our odd speed, which is backed by TX odds, which is it’s the fastest odd speed in the game. So it’s a great product. We’ve done all the integrations. Our tech is second to none. So our goal is to just add, I guess more customers, but also bring in more territory. So we’re trying to prove to rights holders that by switching us on the bookmakers will have a better product.
They’ll turn over more, which then feeds back to the rights holders. So we kind of want to be able to go out and not only package up all the APIs in one place, but also all the rights. And then we can onsell. So if I go to customer now, they still need a contract with UK rights holder, US rights holder, Irish rights holder, pa, S I Ss. So the goal for us will be get it to the point where we’ve already proven how much we bring to the game, how we can increase turnover, and then let everybody get everybody’s product in ours and we can unsell it. They all get their cut, and it just making it easier for a customer to offer horse racing because people like you, not big horse racing punters, but even there’s five or six countries in the world where horse racing’s a big thing. Other countries, it’s an interesting product. It’s just an add-on product to sportsbook. So I don’t think horse racing has done a good job of appealing to those sorts of customers just by nature of how complex it is to offer. So all sported simplify it. I would say get horse racing in more shop windows all over the world and making sure that that money then flows back to the right place so we can keep supporting the people in the game.
Ryan Knuppel:
I love it. So I like opening it up to what you need help with. So there may be somebody listening to this show that can help you in some area or help your company in some area. What would be your ask for somebody listening to this that may be interested in what you guys are doing? What do you need? What are you guys looking for? What do you need help with? What do you want our audience to do to help you?
Alan Casey:
Well, the best sports books, customers, I mean, keep us in mind. We’re kind of a startup. We’re backed luckily by TX Odds and their tech stack that, as I said a second to none. They’ve been in the online game industry since it started basically in 1999. So for us, we’re just trying to get the name out there. Now we’ve seen good success with our product, but the main ask is to get rights holders on board us is a bit tricky because it’s working really well there. The pool betting, the price ones in the US are great. So is there’s a fear there that it’ll cannibalize the already what’s working. But I guess as I touched on earlier, I think it can just add to it if done right, if the right commercial terms are there, we can eliminate some of the greed that’s existed elsewhere in horse racing around the world, that it can really be a nice add-on, and then those price funds can go up even further and just make it a better sport. So we’re happy. I mean, we’ve already talked to loads of different companies that don’t necessarily align to what we’re doing, but have the same vision of growing horse racing. So our ownership group and our backers, we’re all horse racing owners. We’re passionate about the game and we want to see it survive. So all ears reach out to me, let’s just talk, but our goals anywhere, but with the view to let’s try and make this sport as good as we can possibly make it and make sure that it’s around for another a hundred years plus.
Ryan Knuppel:
Alan Casey of all Sported, thank you so much, Alan. Alan, how would people get ahold of you if they want to email or get ahold of? What’s the best channel to get ahold of you personally?
Alan Casey:
Yeah, I think LinkedIn. I think you have me, Ryan, on LinkedIn. We have our website, als boarder.com. There’s email there. Yeah, that’s probably the best. Two ways to get me.
Ryan Knuppel:
I love LinkedIn. Yeah, it’s definitely a channel to communicate in business, so that’s awesome, Alan,
Alan Casey:
My Twitter feed is just going to be jets bragging as we march our way to the Super Bowl this year. Let’s
Ryan Knuppel:
Hope. Right? Let’s hope they’re bragging. Yeah, bragging or disappointment, one of the two. Well, cool. Any last words? Anything we missed out on that you wanted to touch on, Alan?
Alan Casey:
No, no. Happy out, Ryan. I mean, just really appreciate you having me on. It’s been great to catch up with you again and hope to see you soon.
Ryan Knuppel:
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Alan. We’ll put all those links in the show notes. Until next time, we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks Bub.
Alan Casey:
Thanks. Bye.
Ryan Knuppel:
Alright, that was Alan Casey of All Sported episode 206. I hope you enjoyed that. We got a little horse racing education for some of us not so educated horse racing fans. All sport is doing some cool things in this space. So I urge you to go out, check him out, get ahold of Alan. Great guy to talk to. I’ll put his LinkedIn in the show notes so you can get out there and chat with him as well. Urge you all to do that. Okay, I hope you enjoy football tonight. Hey, I’m going Chiefs to win by 10 tonight. Now, I’ve been going back and forth a little bit. I thought maybe the lions were going to compete, but then my brain just keeps saying, no. It’s Mahomes, it’s Chiefs. They’re well tested. They’re ready to go. They’re going to win by at least a touchdown. I’ll go them winning by seven to 10. So I’m taking the Chiefs to cover tonight. Hey, I’m not a professional handicapper, so don’t come back to me if it doesn’t win. But that’s what I’m betting on tonight. So enjoy the game. Enjoy football. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m Ryan Knupple. You can find me out on LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever you want, K N U p or Ryan Knupple. Alright, until next time. Thank you. Stay safe and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
Relevant Alan Casey Links
- Learn more about AllSported on their website.
- You can connect with Alan Casey on LinkedIn.
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- If you are looking for sports content services you can find more information on the Knup Solutions website.
- Listen to more episodes of the Knup Sports Show.
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