Better Collective Holds 2026 Guidance as North America Rebounds

Better Collective held its full-year 2026 guidance after a second quarter in which North American revenue climbed 35% to €24.2 million and the region’s operating earnings margin swung from 5% to 26%. The Copenhagen-based affiliate group reported Q2 revenue of €89 million, up 9% year on year, with EBITDA before special items up 20% to €27 million, according to its interim report published August 20, 2026.

The quarter’s growth, worth roughly €11 million in added revenue, was absorbed in part by two regulatory drags the company quantified at about €2 million each: the increase in the UK’s tax on online casino revenue from 21% to 40%, effective April 1, 2026, and regulatory changes in Brazil. Both hit hardest in the group’s paid-media arm, which buys advertising on search engines, social platforms, and third-party sports media to acquire customers for sportsbook partners.

Co-founder and co-CEO Jesper Søgaard pointed to the mix behind the North American recovery: revenue-share income, talent-led media, and the group’s newer prediction-markets coverage. “We are particularly encouraged by the progress in North America, where growth was driven by revenue share income, talent-led media and prediction markets,” Søgaard said in the release. “The FIFA World Cup provided the expected boost to the quarter. With full-year guidance maintained, we remain focused on profitable growth, continued operating leverage and building an increasingly scalable and efficient Better Collective.”

The 2026 targets are unchanged: organic revenue growth of 7–12%, EBITDA before special items growth of 8–18%, both in constant currencies, €40 million of share buybacks, and net debt below three times EBITDA. The Q2 2026 report puts the UK tax increase and the Brazil changes at a combined negative impact of approximately €8 million on full-year EBITDA before special items.

North America’s Numbers

The regional table in the report is where the quarter’s story sits. North American revenue reached €24.2 million in Q2, up from €17.9 million a year earlier, and €50.1 million across the first half. Within that, revenue-share income grew 49% to €6.3 million in the quarter, while North American CPA income rose 50% to €5.1 million, driven by what the company describes as intensifying competition among prediction-market operators signing customers on per-acquisition deals.

Sponsorship was the other engine. Group sponsorship revenue rose 39% to €15.7 million, with the North American slice up 66% to €8.7 million, powered by Playmaker HQ, the talent-led media business Better Collective acquired in 2023. Its quarter included a live edition of The Roommates Show with New York Knicks players Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart at Madison Square Garden, presented by Chase with ESPN as a partner, which the report says sold more than 5,000 tickets in under 15 minutes. North American period costs were held broadly flat at €17.9 million, against €17 million a year earlier, which is how a €6.3 million revenue gain converted into regional EBITDA before special items of €6.3 million, up from €1 million.

The customer-activity metrics underneath the affiliate model moved the same direction. New depositing customers rose 24% year on year to 373,000, 70% of them delivered under revenue-share agreements. Value of deposits, the total deposited in the quarter by players referred under those agreements, reached €836 million, an all-time high, up 17% on Q2 2025. The report attributes the surge to the first phase of the FIFA World Cup 2026, which opened in June across several of the group’s core markets.

The UK and Brazil Costs Are Now Quantified

The report’s fine print gives the two regulatory headwinds hard numbers for the first time. The near-doubling of the UK’s Remote Gaming Duty on April 1, 2026 shaved approximately €2 million off Q2 revenue, and the Brazilian regulatory changes took a similar amount. Together, management expects them to cost approximately €8 million of EBITDA before special items across 2026, a figure baked into the maintained guidance rather than treated as a reason to cut it.

Group costs rose 5% to €62.1 million, slower than revenue. Direct costs climbed €3.3 million on World Cup activity, Playmaker HQ event spend, and paid-media investment, while staff costs fell 2% to €26.5 million on a lower average headcount of 1,535 full-time employees, down from 1,682 a year earlier. Cash flow from operations before special items rose 59% to €29.9 million, a cash conversion rate of 111%. The group completed €8 million of buybacks in the quarter and €14 million across the half, and finished June with net interest-bearing debt of €252.7 million, or 2.31 times EBITDA before special items, against credit facilities totaling €319 million.

What Comes Next for Better Collective

After the reporting period, on July 13, 2026, the company launched in Alberta as the Canadian province opened its regulated online sports betting and iGaming market, deploying Action Network, The Nation Network, and Canada Sports Betting alongside its Playbook betting product and paid-media operation. Playbook itself expanded into Brazil during Q2 via X, Telegram, and Discord, its first move outside earlier launch markets.

The disclosure calendar sets the next checkpoints. Better Collective publishes its Q3 2026 interim report on November 18, 2026, with the annual report following February 24, 2027. The World Cup’s knockout rounds and the start of the NFL season, which management has flagged as the key commercial moment for prediction-market partners, both fall inside the third quarter now underway.