Major tournaments like the World Cup bring a huge spike in activity for sportsbooks. There are more matches, more markets, and more content than usual. This can make navigation difficult for users.
In this interview, Nikos Zygouris, Head of Sportsbook Product at Altenar, explains how the new World Cup Lobby brings everything into one place. It is designed to make discovery easier and create a smoother, more engaging experience during the tournament.
Major tournaments generate huge spikes in sportsbook activity and content volume. From a product perspective, what challenges does that create for operators?
Events like the World Cup completely change the way users interact with a sportsbook. During regular periods, navigation is relatively predictable, but in a tournament with more than 100 matches happening across multiple weeks, users are suddenly exposed to an enormous amount of content, markets, statistics, promotions, and betting options at the same time.
The challenge for operators is making all of that feel structured and easy to navigate rather than overwhelming. Users want instant access not only to matches, but also to team insights, player markets, outrights, standings, and trending bets. If that experience becomes fragmented across multiple sections of the sportsbook, engagement drops very quickly.
That was one of the main reasons behind the creation of the World Cup Lobby: building one place where everything related to the tournament is centralised, contextual, and much easier to explore.
What was the core idea behind the World Cup Lobby, and how does it change the user journey during a major tournament?
The goal was to create a fully curated tournament experience rather than simply displaying a list of matches.
With the World Cup Lobby, users can move seamlessly between matches, teams, players, outright markets, statistics, and promotions within a single environment. We introduced dedicated navigation layers, team and player pages, standings, knockout structures, and interactive widgets that surface relevant betting opportunities dynamically.
The idea is to reduce friction and allow users to naturally discover more content around the tournament instead of forcing them to search for it manually across the sportsbook.
Personalisation seems to be a major part of the product. How important is regional relevance during an event like the World Cup?
It’s extremely important because World Cup engagement is very different depending on the region and audience. Users in Brazil, Mexico, Europe, or the US all follow the tournament differently and care about different teams, players, and betting narratives.
The Lobby allows operators to prioritise content based on local relevance. That could mean surfacing specific national teams, highlighting regional betting trends, or promoting markets that are particularly popular in certain territories.
We also support more dynamic personalisation based on player behaviour. For example, if users are heavily engaging with outright markets or specific player props, the Lobby can surface related recommendations and betting opportunities much more prominently.
This creates a much more relevant experience compared to a static, one-size-fits-all tournament page.
The Lobby includes dedicated widgets, carousels, and tournament-specific navigation tools. From a UX perspective, why are these features important?
During a major tournament, speed of discovery becomes critical. Users don’t want to navigate through multiple layers just to find relevant content.
That’s why we focused heavily on interactive and contextual navigation. Features like swipeable team and player carousels, integrated standings, and direct access to related markets allow users to move naturally through the tournament ecosystem.
The UX approach is designed around exploration. A user might start from a match, move into player markets, then into outright betting or team statistics without ever leaving the tournament environment. That continuity significantly improves engagement and session depth during high-profile events.
Looking beyond this summer’s tournament, how does the World Cup Lobby fit into Altenar’s broader sportsbook strategy?
The World Cup Lobby is part of a much larger focus on personalisation, engagement, and event-driven experiences within the sportsbook.
Although it was designed specifically for the World Cup, the framework itself is flexible and can be adapted for other major competitions across different sports. Operators can run multiple event-focused hubs simultaneously and tailor them to their audience and commercial strategy.
From a product perspective, this is where the industry is moving: toward more immersive and contextual sportsbook experiences rather than static betting interfaces. The objective is to make the sportsbook feel more dynamic, more personalised, and ultimately more engaging for users during the biggest sporting moments.
