FanDuel crushed its American users on NFL parlays and other bets to end the 2025/26 season, paradoxically contributing to its parent company’s sharp stock decline.
Users lost too much too quickly on the NFL wagers, dragging down FanDuel Sportsbook’s business. The online betting platform lost market share to rivals due to its users’ extraordinarily poor performance.
Flutter Entertainment CEO Peter Jackson acknowledged that the sportsbook’s beating on users had a “real impact on customer sentiment.” Some FanDuel customers threw in the towel and ultimately bet less than expected, he said.
The firm, which aggressively promotes high-margin same-game parlays, seemingly failed to follow an old gambling maxim. The 1972 World Series of Poker champion, Amarillo Slim, was famously quoted as saying, “You can shear a sheep a hundred times, but you can skin it only once.”
FanDuel NFL Revenue
In a company report, Flutter said that FanDuel Sportsbook revenue in the fourth quarter, the peak season for sports betting, was up 35% year-on-year to about $1.5 billion.
This increase in revenue was considered unfavorable in the long term for FanDuel, as handle (total amount wagered) rose only 3% compared to fourth quarter of 2024.
Many FanDuel users have accounts with other sportsbooks and may switch if they feel their luck is poor on a particular account. Some may quit placing NFL bets entirely after losing too much on FanDuel.
Problem betting statistics show that half of online sports bettors chase losses. NFL bettors may be at increased risk, with around 60% reporting that they bet too much.
In November, FanDuel launched a new parlay feature allowing groups of users to build bets together. The company marketed it for the Thanksgiving holiday.
FanDuel’s 2025/26 NFL Margin
Across the last NFL season, FanDuel Sportsbook kept 19.2% of the billions of dollars bet on its platform. Near the season’s end, FanDuel had several weeks with over 30% NFL hold.
That’s remarkably high by industry standards, meaning that bettors lost far more than usual.
For comparison, DraftKings Sportsbook reported a 2025/26 NFL season hold of 16%.
Generally, online sportsbooks hold a higher handle share than retail sportsbooks, resulting in steeper user losses and potentially greater harms.
For example, in Nevada, sportsbooks held about 9% of football bets over the season’s final three months.
FanDuel’s NFL Promos Didn’t Fix Problem
Online sportsbooks like FanDuel give users so-called bonus bets to boost NFL spending.
The company admitted it didn’t deploy promo and rewards offers “effectively” to keep users gambling amid their heavy NFL losses. FanDuel calls this its “generosity strategy.”
“It is fair to say that we did not execute our generosity strategy as well as we should have done,” Jackson said during an earnings call. “We pushed hard in the beginning of Q4, and when you look at what the pattern of gross win margins were throughout the back end of Q4, we just saw this very sustained period, including a number of weeks of, as I said earlier, above 30%. We should have pushed harder on generosity at those points, and we did not.”
Zooming Out
FanDuel is one of numerous legal operators taking bets on sports like the NFL in the growing U.S. gambling market.
State-regulated online and mobile sportsbooks won $16.37 billion in 2025, up more than 20% compared to 2024, according to figures from the American Gaming Association.
Nearly $167 billion was bet on those platforms, up 11% versus 2024.
Across 2025, state-regulated commercial sportsbooks held about 10% of bets in the form of revenue.
Amid the growth comes concerns over so-called responsible gambling. In October, the Pew Research Center reported that a growing number of Americans see sports betting as harmful. Recent scandals involving player prop bets, which fuel parlays, likely played a factor.
Heavy user losses from FanDuel NFL bets won’t help public perception that the industry takes more than it gives.
