GAMING IN AFRICA
World Cup 2026: Engagement, cross-sell & retention
Valentin Raigue, Chief Product Officer at Honoré Gaming
GIO: The World Cup is traditionally viewed as a huge acquisition opportunity, but once the tournament ends the challenge becomes retention. How are Honoré Gaming and its operator partners approaching the transition from acquiring players during the World Cup to keeping them engaged long after the final whistle? Valentin Raigue: We treat the World Cup as exactly what it is: the single biggest acquisition window of the four-year football calendar. But acquisition and retention are not sequential phases; they are one continuous discipline. The decisive question is twofold: how you maximise engagement during the tournament and how you retain those players once it ends. Both must be designed before kickoff, because the opportunity to establish a lasting habit exists only while the player is engaged. None of this works without the fundamentals: a stable platform that performs under peak load, fast and reliable deposits and withdrawals, and a complete offering across live, sport and casino. Scalability is equally critical: a World Cup can multiply traffic many times over within minutes, and a platform that cannot absorb that surge converts opportunity into liability. The metric we hold ourselves and our partners to is not registrations in June, but active players in September.
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup set to drive a surge in player acquisition, operators face the bigger challenge of turning short-term interest into lasting value. Valentin Raigue, Chief Product Offi cer at Honoré Gaming explains how CRM automation, gamifi cation, mobile-fi rst technology and scalable infrastructure can help deliver stronger retention long after the tournament ends.
32 JULY 2026 GIO
GIO: Honoré Gaming has partnered with Smartico to enhance its CRM and gamification capabilities. How does this integration help operators better understand player behaviour and deliver more personalised experiences during major sporting events such as the World Cup? VR: Our Smartico integration converts real-time player activity into timely action, and it is our primary cross-sell engine. During a World Cup, the difference between a retained player and a lost one is often clear within the first session, and it is a function of behaviour, not spend. A player who only touches the highest-profile match is structurally fragile; one who explores other markets or a second sport is far more likely to remain.
Smartico allow us to segment on that from day one and trigger the right journey automatically, not one undifferentiated promotion to the whole base.
On that foundation we layer gamification and mission-based mechanics that sustain
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
