Fantasy sports grow four times faster than iGaming
Fantasy sports have a known Achilles' heel: when the big national-team tournaments arrive, club leagues are interrupted and full-season competitions lose momentum. Yet not even that halted their advance. According to the Fantasy Sports 2026 report by the analytics platform Blask, the category closed the year with 3 per cent growth despite the drops recorded during the 2022 World Cup, the 2024 Euro and the 2026 World Cup, a resilience that made it more stable than the very market that sustains it.
That 3 per cent gains dimension when compared with iGaming as a whole, which in the same period grew barely 0.7 per cent, with the all-categories index rising from 59.1 to 60.8 million. Fantasy, by contrast, not only grew four times faster but raised its weight within total demand to 6.4 per cent. The study, presented as the first comprehensive one on the category, relied on the firm's index data for 100 countries and the 50 US states between July 2025 and June 2026, and came out the same week the Premier League 2026/27 season kicked off, on 21 August, ahead of the NFL start scheduled for 9 September, the stretch of the year that most pushes this demand.
The expansion, moreover, is broad-based. Of the 100 countries analysed, 49 showed both more fantasy demand and more share of the total, against 25 in which both indicators retreated and 22 in which demand rose although its relative weight fell, a distribution that led Blask to speak of a structural change and not an isolated peak.
The growth map, however, does not match the volume one. The strongest jumps came in mid-size European markets, with Lithuania at the top at 100 per cent, followed by Romania at 94 per cent and Hungary at 90 per cent, while the United Kingdom and the United States still command in volume and together concentrate 40 per cent of world fantasy demand. That dissociation between where scale is and where growth is, is, for the report, one of the traits defining the category's moment.
Tags: Blask, Fantasy Sports 2026 Report, fantasy sports, iGaming demand