The struggling US sportsbook, PlayUp, is due to be sold. This is because the brand’s US operations are going through a period of intense restructuring and it is set to be sold to a publicly listed company in the near future. While this sale won’t affect the activities of its Australian parent company, it will bring in a new management team to oversee the US operations of the online sportsbook.
A difficult market for PlayUp
PlayUp was only launched in the states of New Jersey and Colorado and has found it hard to survive in the competitive betting marketplace. A lack of readily available cash has meant that the brand had previously considered selling up in 2022. This nearly came through but the $350 million fee was never paid due to the fact that PlayUp wasn’t able to supply the required financial data by the deadline.
The US launch of PlayUp was supposed to coincide with the arrival of much-needed capital. However, this fell through when the interested FTX crypto exchange became beset by issues which meant that it went out of business and left PlayUp high and dry to struggle on as before.
From here, PlayUp has continued its operations in
New Jersey
and Colorado with a bare minimum of employees, and there have been reports that the brand has sometimes struggled to pay its workforce.
However, it now looks like the sale of PlayUp is set to go through. The regulators in New Jersey and Colorado have already been alerted as to the impending changes, and there is expected to be a formal offer made in July.
It remains to be seen who is going to come in to snap up PlayUp’s operations. The brand is expected to carry on in other territories where it is already one of the largest DFS operators in Australia, as well as a key player in other markets such as New Zealand and India.
However, it looks like it will mark the end of another Australian betting brand that has struggled to get a toehold in the fledgling US betting market. PointsBet is another Australian online sportsbook that has had a hard time in boosting its market share and it has been the subject of a bidding war between
DraftKings
and Fanatics.
While PointsBet started out with a more ambitious plan than PlayUp by gaining licensing in many more states, it has experienced the similar difficulties of a limited market share.
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Who will buy PlayUp?
At the moment, there are still no indications as to who the publicly listed company is that is lined up to buy PlayUp. The interested party will get all of the sportsbook’s US operations including the brand’s operations in Colorado and New Jersey.
It’s also worth noting that PlayUp held market access agreements with a number of other states such as Iowa, Pennsylvania and Indiana. So while PlayUp might have failed to crack the US, there is no reason why another ambitious brand can’t fare a little better.
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