Singers Elyanna and Jessie Reyez perform during the opening ceremony of Canada's first match at the World Cup in Toronto last month. Ontarians wagered $1.03-billion last month, up 35 per cent from the $768-million that was bet in June, 2025.Claudia Greco/Reuters
Sports gambling in Ontario surged in June, with both the number of active betting accounts and the amount of money at stake jumping more than 30 per cent year over year amid a flood of attention for the FIFA World Cup, according to figures released Thursday by iGaming Ontario.
Now, sportsbooks are hoping to convert all of those new customers into players of their casino and other online games.
Ontarians wagered $1.03-billion on sports, esports, proposition and novelty bets as well as exchange betting last month, up 35 per cent from the $768-million that was bet in June, 2025. Canadian sports gambling companies hoped to capitalize on the hype of a first World Cup on home soil and only the third one to include a Canadian men’s team, which was expected to draw many first-time or casual bettors.
That total wagered was up six per cent from May, making 2026 the first year since the province opened to private gambling operators in 2022 that the amount of money bet on sports rose in June from the previous month. Gambling traditionally falls off as the NHL and NBA seasons come to a close in mid-June.
There were 1.32 million active player accounts in the province in June, up 30 per cent from the 1.01 million accounts in June, 2025. That made it the second-highest monthly total on record, behind only January of this year when 1.33 million accounts were active. (The numbers do not indicate how many people are active bettors, as individuals can have multiple accounts.)
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The figures do not include betting offered by Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, the province’s government-owned gambling operator.
Sports gambling operators in Ontario had been anticipating the World Cup would drive hundreds of thousands of new bettors to their sites, fuelled by fans climbing on the Team Canada bandwagon.
A survey by the online payments processor Paysafe indicated 46 per cent of Ontarians were expected to wager on the tournament, with nine per cent placing their first bets.
The expected crush of new bettors worried critics of online gambling. On the day the World Cup kicked off, the Canadian Mental Health Association launched a public service campaign warning of the negative effects of normalizing sports betting.
Sports betting companies anticipated new users coming with the World Cup, fuelled by fans climbing on the Team Canada bandwagon.COLE BURSTON/AFP/Getty Images
At a panel discussion during an industry conference a few weeks before the tournament, Tim Whitehead, the head of sportsbook operations for DraftKings, described the World Cup as “one of the events that breaks through sports media into mainstream and pop culture.”
“You’re going to have a broader demographic of just entertainment seekers and people that are new to your products, because it’s such a cultural experience,” he explained at the SBC Summit Canada conference. “People just want to get in on that action.”
Like other companies that were using the tournament to woo new customers, Whitehead said that DraftKings had built a new Spanish-language platform “specially with the World Cup in mind and beyond” for Spanish-speaking Canadians and Americans who previously would have had to use English-language apps.
Yohan Mathew, the director of marketing and revenue for BetMGM Canada, said the tournament “might be the last big real acquisition opportunity in the Ontario market.” (Alberta opened its market to private operators earlier this month, making it only the second Canadian province to do so.)
Even before the tournament kicked off, however, the sportsbooks were investing heavily in plans to convert new customers to their other products, to help justify the significant marketing expenses associated with their World Cup campaigns. Andrew Cochrane, the chief commercial officer of gaming company Soft2Bet, told the panel that “you have to shift a sizable percentage to iGaming,” such as online casinos. “If you can’t do that, you’re going to run out of money pretty quickly.”
In June, Ontarians wagered $8.3-billion on online casino games, the third-highest monthly total on record.