Which Sports Are Actually Worth Betting on an Exchange?
Twenty sports show up in the rules. Only three carry a published figure.
Betfair's own rule pages name more than twenty sports and sport groups, from football and cricket to darts and esports, with politics listed separately on Flutter's own data page. A traceable matched figure exists for exactly three of them: football, cricket and politics (the markets hub on this site already gathers those pound totals, so this page will not repeat them). Everything else, tennis and horse racing included, carries no published figure at all. What this page adds instead is narrower: which of five exchanges, Betfair, Betdaq, Smarkets, Matchbook and Orbit's own archived pages, actually names a given sport on its own site. A name in a rulebook is not an offer, and it is certainly not a size. Check the exchange's current terms, and your own country's rules, before any of this turns into a bet.
A published figure beats a listed one
A sport can sit inside an exchange's rulebook for years without a single official figure ever attached to it. That is not an accusation, just how a rulebook works: it lists what is allowed to be backed and laid, not what actually gets matched. The sport-by-sport figures already gathered on this site's markets hub cover football's regional monthly totals, cricket's yearly total and how it spreads across thousands of matches, and two separate election markets (so none of that gets repeated here, only pointed at).
Tennis and horse racing sit in exactly the same rulebook as football. Both have their own rule pages and their own market types: each-way and place terms appear in the rules without being tied to a specific sport, racing included, and an in-play delay question sits over tennis in particular. Neither carries a published figure. Not one total. Not one match. Not one meeting. That gap is worth sitting with for a second, because two of the sports most bettors would probably name first if asked what an exchange is actually for, tennis and horse racing, are also two of the sports where nothing official ever turned up to sit beside the totals football, cricket and politics already carry. This site's own racing page goes further into what Betfair does publish for that sport, and it turns out to be a starting-price mechanism, not a size, worth reading on the page built around that exact question.
None of this is a complaint about Betfair specifically. A newsletter highlights the sport with a story worth telling that month, not every sport with a queue. Football gets a regional monthly figure because someone in marketing pulled that number; a midweek snooker frame almost certainly traded too, and nobody wrote a sentence about it. Read a missing figure as silence, not as an answer either way.
Which exchange actually names it
Enough scene-setting. Here is the table this page actually exists for.
Five exchanges, one row per sport family, each cell built from that exchange's own pages, not from a broker's marketing copy about it. "Named" means the sport turned up somewhere official: a dedicated rule page, a homepage list, an archived menu. It says nothing about how deep any of it actually runs (what actually decides whether a bet gets filled is a separate question entirely), and nothing about whether your own country can even reach it.
| Sport | Betfair | Betdaq | Smarkets | Matchbook | Orbit (archived) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Football | Named | Named | Named | Named | Named |
| Horse racing | Named | Named | Named | Named | Named |
| Cricket | Named | Not named | Named | Not named | Named |
| Tennis | Named | Not named | Named | Not named | Named |
| Greyhounds | Named | Named | Not named | Streaming only | Named |
| American football | Named | Not named | Named | Named | Named |
| Basketball | Named | Not named | Not named | Named | Named |
| Baseball | Named | Not named | Not named | Named | Named |
| Politics | Named | Not named | Named | Not named | Named |
| Darts and snooker | Named | Not named | Not named | Not named | Named |
| Golf and esports | Named | Not named | Not named | Not named | Named |
Four notes before you read anything into a cell. Matchbook's one greyhounds cell reads "Streaming only" rather than "Not named": Matchbook does carry the sport, for race streaming, without ever putting greyhounds on the sports list it names as its main markets, so a flat "not named" would have overstated the gap. Betfair's politics markets sit on Flutter's own data page, not a dedicated Exchange rule page, which is why that row still reads named rather than carrying an asterisk of its own. Betdaq's whole column rests on one help-centre sentence naming its three most popular sports, so a blank cell there means the page we read never mentioned the sport, not that Betdaq definitely excludes it. Orbit's column comes from one archived snapshot of a site that returned nothing readable when we tried it live, with no current operator we could confirm behind it. Read that column as "once listed", never as "currently offered", and never as proof of any live link to Betfair.
What the coverage count is actually telling you
Add up that table by row instead of by column and a pattern falls out. Football and horse racing appear on all five lists checked here, the only two that do. Cricket, tennis, politics, basketball and baseball each turn up on three of the five (not always the same three, which matters more than the raw count does). Darts, golf, snooker and esports show up on two: Betfair's rule pages and Orbit's archived one, nothing in between.
Here is the part worth remembering next time coverage gets quoted as if it were quality. Horse racing sits at the very top of that count, named absolutely everywhere, and still has no published figure anywhere in this research. Tennis manages only three of five and is in exactly the same position: no figure, whatever the count says. Cricket also manages three of five, the same score as tennis, and yet by this site's own markets hub it is the single biggest sport a matched figure was ever found for. Coverage and traded totals are simply not measuring the same thing, and a sport can lead one list while having no traded figure to rank at all.
Naming a sport is one question, and how its markets actually get shaped is a separate one again: Betfair's own fixed-line handicap runs alongside a similar-looking line the Asian bookmakers price their own way. That is worth a look if odds shape interests you more than which sport made the list.
Coverage is not the same as depth.
What kind of source sits behind each column
Not all five columns rest on the same kind of evidence, and that matters before you treat any two of them as equal.
- Betfair. An index of individual rule pages, one per sport, plus a separate data page for politics. The fullest and most granular source on this table by a wide margin.
- Betdaq. One help-centre sentence naming three sports as its most popular. Nothing granular beyond that sentence, so a "not named" cell here really only means "not mentioned in that one sentence".
- Smarkets. Its own live homepage, a plain list with no separate rule page per sport. It also now brands part of itself around how a yes/no contract prices the same event instead, alongside a similar move from Matchbook, so treat that homepage list as a snapshot, not a constant. Check your country before either kind of contract matters to you.
- Matchbook. Site text plus a getting-started help page. Horse racing is described as a recent addition, not an original feature, and Matchbook streams some greyhound racing without ever listing greyhounds among its main sports, which is why that cell above reads differently from the rest of its row.
- Orbit. An archived navigation menu, twenty-seven names, taken from a site that gave us nothing readable when we tried it directly. No confirmed operator sits behind any of it.
Named does not set the price you pay
Forget the sports table for a moment. Whatever a sport's row said above, the exchange commission that applies once you actually win mostly comes down to where you live and which exchange you used, not which sport you backed. Mostly, not always: a couple of exchanges carve out their own sport-linked exceptions to that standard rate, covered in the example below.
That is also where a broker actually earns its keep, or fails to.
Reaching any of this through a broker
Which door costs less depends on the exchange, not a blanket rule: Betdaq's own terms charge 5% outside the UK, Ireland, Gibraltar and Jersey, while MadMarket's Sharp Exchange, Sportmarket's FairExchange and BetInAsia's Orbit-branded account are each stated at a flat 3%. A broker exists for the country lists and the extra reach a single direct account cannot give you regardless of price, and this site follows four of them: BetInAsia, AsianConnect, MadMarket and Sportmarket, and coverage differs sharply between the four of them. BetInAsia and MadMarket both exclude UK and US residents from registering at all; Sportmarket adds France to that same short list; AsianConnect is the only one of the four confirmed to list an Orbit-branded tool on a live page today, and it lists neither Betdaq, Smarkets nor Matchbook on the pages we could read. How BetInAsia, AsianConnect, MadMarket and Sportmarket line up against each other runs fees, minimums and country lists side by side, if a name above is the actual reason you are here.
None of that changes what one broker login is worth once you already hold it. What one broker login into several exchange tools actually adds, and does not add, is covered on its own page, worth reading before a wider row in the table above gets mistaken for a wider stake ceiling below it, because it is not one. A broker's own tool keeps its own minimum stake and its own exchange commission regardless of how many rows above happen to carry its name, and the exchange it fronts still runs its own country list underneath, whatever the broker's marketing page implies. Identity checks apply before any withdrawal too, at the broker and, where the exchange asks directly, there as well: expect one photo ID and one proof of address, whichever door you actually used to get in.
For the fuller sport-by-sport money picture, not just who names what, start there before you fund anything.