The button is small, easy to miss. “Watch live” it reads, with an iPhone-like notification in red, hoping to draw the attention of a would-be gambler on the interface of FanDuel, one of the behemoths of US sports betting. Small but, for the NRL – embarking on an expensive gamble to Las Vegas as part of its 2024 season launch – significant.

With a population of 330 million, the appeal of the US market is obvious for a code that makes more money from TV than anything else. But even the most committed of rugby league fans are realistic: NRL audiences will never equal the likes of American football and baseball. MMA is booming. New entrants like pickleball are always around the corner. And now, the NRL’s own video platform has just 3,000 US subscribers. That button, however, highlights one of the NRL’s best chances for success.

FanDuel and DraftKings are the dominant names in a booming sports betting industry in the US, which was allowed to develop once a prohibitive federal law was struck down by the supreme court in 2018. In 2023, the industry recorded revenues of more than $16bn in Australian dollars, according to the American Gaming Association. In total, more than $180bn was gambled. And sports betting is still illegal in many states, including population-heavy California and Texas.

The boom has drawn concern from organisations who work with problem gamblers. The NFL’s Super Bowl two weeks ago – at the same venue in Las Vegas the NRL will hold its double-header next weekend – attracted an estimated 68 million US bettors, and $35bn in wagers. The NRL’s decision to take the game to gambling’s ground-zero has also attracted criticism.

Few Australians are more familiar with the US market than Sam Swanell, chief executive of ASX-listed PointsBet. He says, like in Australia, there is a discussion around betting advertising, and harm minimisation efforts were more advanced in some states than others. But he argues more established markets like Australia have helped created a benchmark for US state legislatures.

“There’s self-exclusion registers, and ‘take a break’ [programs] and deposit limits and all those sorts of things,” he said. “The bit that is creating discussion right at the moment in the US is the advertising piece.”

These concerns have not slowed down industry growth. US betting sports industry revenues have increased 45% in the past year.

Swanell’s company found early success with US expansion before selling its operations there last year for $333m. He thinks the NRL’s American mission is improbable, but not impossible.

“Getting any new sport to enter the US market and get a foothold, that is a big challenge,” he says. “But a model whereby you are thinking about selling some TV subscriptions, thinking about watch-and-wager opportunities … that sounds like it could lead to something.”

The so-called watch-and-wager model is nothing new. In Australia, horse racing content is prominent inside sport betting apps, and even sports such as tennis and ice hockey are available for punters to stream. Although bets on live events must still be made over the phone, the US market is less restrictive.

“When a sportsbook can also stream an event, that’s a stickiness for the product that’s hard to replicate,” says Dustin Gouker, a US sports betting analyst. “If you can bet on something and then watch it on the app, it keeps you engaged with the sportsbook. And makes you more likely to place a live wager.”

Some international sports have found a committed – if small – audience of American gamblers, sometimes due to small gaps in the rapidly expanding market. When Colorado opened sports betting in 2020, most competitions were shut down due to Covid. It allowed table tennis – which was still being played at the time – to become one of the state’s most popular sports for gamblers. Three years later and it still attracts more than $13m of bets each month, only narrowly trailing tennis and association football.

“Sportsbooks can always use more content,” says Chris Grove, partner emeritus at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming. “They definitely see diminishing returns as they add more content and content with a smaller audience. But the US sports calendar is fairly lumpy and has a lot of empty patches.”

The timing of the NRL season helps its chances. NFL has recently concluded, baseball has not yet started, and basketball and ice hockey leagues are midway through their marathon 82-game seasons.

Having said that, the NRL did have an opportunity to claim a foothold when much of global sport shut down in 2020. The NRL was broadcast in the US then – albeit on a minor channel, with live matches in the early morning – but never took off.

Securing a place on the primary channel of Fox Sports on a Saturday night has therefore been declared a victory for the NRL. Rugby League Commission chair Peter V’landys has even thanked Lachlan Murdoch personally. But Fox Sports 1 is only available to subscription television, and much of the east coast will already be asleep by kick-off.

NRL officials have committed to five years of season openers in Las Vegas. Changing US viewing habits might take generations however, highlighting the importance of the NRL’s engagement with gambling firms, which could deliver more immediate returns.

“Operators have spent hundreds of millions in the land-grab for customers and now need to do everything they can to retain them,” says Matthew Chaprales, another US sports betting consultant. “In-app content is one of the ways they can achieve that.”

Yet a stream in a sports betting app will not be the NRL’s panacea. In fact, the UK’s rugby league competition Super League is already available to watch in FanDuel. And handing over the rights to stream matches to betting companies – however large their user base – undermines the value of a potential US broadcast deal.

“It’s a big deal for a big sport to hand over their vision like that,” Swanell says. “But you see more second-tier stuff being available. If you think about it, you have Americans sitting there, they want to have a bet on a lower-tier European soccer match or a tennis match. Well, they might not be able to find an easy way to watch it, so the easiest way is to say ‘I can actually have a bet on it and watch it on my phone’.”

In Australia, the NRL takes a cut of bets made on the sport under a so-called “product fee” arrangement with bookmakers. It drives tens of millions of dollars of revenues each year. But in the maturing US market, for a minor international sport, such an arrangement is not available.

“It’s not as simple to just go and apply that product fee regime [in the US],” Swanell says. “A lot of it comes down to, if there’s demand for the product, there’s demand for the vision, there’s demand for the data, there’s demand for information etcetera. That’s what operators would pay for, they would say ‘OK, well, we’re really keen on this content’.”

And so, while much has been made of the betting opportunities of the NRL’s great Las Vegas adventure, there’s no cheap trick. The success of the foray will largely be left to the lure of the game itself.

In the US, call the National Council on Problem Gambling at 800-GAMBLER or text 800GAM. In the UK, support for problem gambling can be found via the NHS National Problem Gambling Clinic on 020 7381 7722, or GamCare on 0808 8020 133. In Australia, Gambling Help Online is available on 1800 858 858 and the National Debt Helpline is at 1800 007 007