The brand with the lion, famous for pioneering the mobile gaming market before anyone else had fully appreciated how huge that part of the industry would become.
LeoVegas has been a mobile first company since it was founded, and existed solely as an online casino before launching a sportsbook back in 2016. The brand has won countless industry awards for both of its products, and that doesn’t happen by accident, and their excellent customer retention would also suggest that these awards were merited.
As a sportsbook the brand has a surprisingly diverse range of sports to bet on and good market depth to boot, plus odds that regularly beat the market average so that customers can rest assured they are getting a decent deal here. They also have a fun in-play area with a good amount of live streaming, so despite being a bookie/casino hybrid, LeoVegas does a thorough job in both departments.
Their app really is a selling point for them, whether that be for sports betting or casino games, the latter of which is just an added benefit for sports fans who also enjoy gaming, and their support team work around the clock too.
It’s a bit of a quirky bookmaker in many respects, not only because of the branding and the company history as a casino, but also because of the unique website design, making LeoVegas stand out in a see of bookie clones.
It’s quite possibly a bookmaker that some punters have ever even considered betting with in the past, but that is a shame for both sides, because LeoVegas Sports has a lot more to offer sports bettors than you might think.
- Mobile app – This has to be LeoVegas’ main selling point, because it is their forte. The platform was built for mobile first, so everything they do is focussed on app users.
- Casino – It has to be said, as online casinos go, especially mobile first casinos, LeoVegas are one of the best.
- Niche sports – A surprisingly wide range of niche and obscure sports to bet on, including some I have never seen elsewhere.
Using the Website
So. The desktop site isn’t my favourite.
Remember though, the platform at LeoVegas Sports was developed for mobile phone use, and then adapted for use on desktops, so what you are getting on a laptop or computer is not their very best product. Read the next section on mobile betting for a much more positive experience.
To be clear, this is my own personal preference; there is nothing technically wrong with the site. It works perfectly well, it’s quick and fairly intuitive, it’s just a bit basic for my tastes.
The interface is quite different to most other sites, which is nice in a way because when everything looks the same it can get a bit boring, can’t it? There is an awful lot of empty white space though.
The sports home page is more of a live betting page, so anything currently in play or upcoming will be available on there via a menu toggle, but if you want to browse future markets then you will need to go via the Browse Sports option on the menu, which opens a rather ugly pop up.
From here you can select your sport and league and view the games available, before choosing a specific event and viewing all of the detailed betting markets within it. You can select more than one league/competition from the ugly pop up, which is handy because it means you don’t keep having to circle back to look at something else.
Oddly, there is no way to get back to the in-play area once you have been through this process though. You can clear all of your selections and the home page (in-play page) will show up again, but there isn’t a specific menu button for it. This tripped me up at first, and I just had to open the site again to view in-play events.
I found the site much more satisfying to use while in event view, as the whole thing opens up more at that point, but on the whole I much prefer the mobile version. See what you think, I may well be in the minority here because it’s a sportsbook that has plenty of customers.
Betting via the Mobile App
Everything about the mobile app is so much better than the desktop version.
You would expect as much given that LeoVegas Sports are all about mobile first betting, but it’s good to be able to confirm that they actually are one of the best in the industry in this field.
There is a mobile site too, although both operate in the exact same way so I will refer to them as one and the same in this review.
The mobile app has much more of a sense of flow about it, so as the user you experience more control over what you are doing and how you get from one place to the next.
A footer menu with a few simple options gives instant access to your bets, betslip, and the Browse Sports button. This last one works brilliantly because you can open it up every time you want to add or remove a selected league or competition from the future events you can see on the page.
For example, if I was building a footy acca and started with the Premier League, then decided I wanted to add a few Championship and maybe League 1 sides in there too, it takes two taps of the phone screen and they are available to select. It’s an original and excellent way of doing things.
Betting in-play is good fun on the app too, everything fits together nicely, with the horizontal scrolling menu offering different sports, before the individual events are displayed below along with the 1×2 market odds and the current score.
This encourages opening each individual event in order to bet on it, but event view has a lot to offer even if you only tend to bet on fairly popular and straightforward markets, what with all of the stats and game representations etc.
To round it off, the app feels solid in the way it performs. It works as quickly as you need it to, never struggling with tasks or quick changes of mind – I don’t think I have made any accidental selections since I have been using it, which does happen with the slower apps.
I only ever bet with LeoVegas via their app, because it’s such a well constructed product.
Sports Betting Markets and Odds
What with LeoVegas Sports being an add on to their longer established online casino, it’s fair to say that it is not their flagship product.
You might think this would mean a reduction in the number of sports you can bet on and the depth of market within those sports, but you would be dead wrong.
In fact, I found more sports categories at LeoVegas than at most of the other bookies I regularly visit – I counted over 40 sports last time I used the site.
There were even sports I had never seen before, like Jai Alai, along with other lesser spotted niche sports such as chess, trotting, rowing, beach soccer. LeoVegas Sports is therefore a surprisingly good bookie for anyone who likes to bet on niche sports markets.
They would be mad not to include the big dogs like football, tennis and so on as well, and of course, they do. LeoVegas Sports actually has just as much depth of market in popular sports as bigger more traditional bookies, ranging down to tier 7 of the English football pyramid, and covering every tennis competition I have ever heard of.
They have horse racing and greyhound racing too, and they cover races worldwide for the gee gees with best odds guaranteed available for all UK and Irish races.
Compared to a small number of bigger bookies, you might find that there are slightly fewer betting lines available within events lower down the pecking order for each sport – so an NBA game might have more betting options than a French basketball game, for example – but other than that, the sportsbook at LeoVegas is rich with sports categories and betting markets.
Honestly, I was surprised at how much there was available here, and it is their successful partnership with Kambi that is behind much of this.
The odds are surprisingly good too, better than average in most cases which makes LeoVegas Sports difficult to ignore. They don’t tend to take huge margins from the odds sample that I studied, and they have boosts available sometimes too which can even improve on this.
So, lots to bet on and at good prices too – what’s not to love?
In-Play Betting
It’s another big green tick for LeoVegas Sports in the live betting department.
What I really like about their live betting package is the rich features and the fullness of the overall product. You’ve got cash out, you’ve got instant bet markets (fast markets, flash markets, whatever you want to call them), you’ve got loads of stats, a great game visualisation graphic, live streaming for a lot of events, and son on.
There is just a lot of good stuff going on at every step of the in-play betting experience.
You won’t struggle to find something to bet on either, as they cover an awful lot, from bowling to American football and everything either side.
The in-play betting interface is nice to use as well, both on mobile and, surprisingly, on desktop.
In event view you can select markets via the filtering buttons at the top, but also minimise betting lines you are not interested in, so the screen generally stays pretty tidy and reduces the amount of scrolling you have to do to a minimum, and the game visualisation/live streaming area is well positioned in parallel.
Speaking of which, there is a lot to enjoy in this box, it’s full of in game stats, head to heads, key events, league and competition tables, and that sort of thing. It will vary by sport a little, but that’s the sort of content you can expect, and it’s fairly detailed too.
Of course, where live streaming is available you might prefer to watch the stream instead, and you can get live streams on a lot of sports at LeoVegas too, not just horse racing and some football, but esports, tennis, snooker etc. too, and the stream can be expanded to make it larger.
I really rate live betting at LeoVegas.
Banking and Payments
| Method | Min Deposit | Min Withdrawal | Fees | Withdrawal Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Debit Card | £10 | £10 | 0% | Up to 24 Hours |
| PayPal | £10 | £10 | 0% | Up to 24 Hours |
| Apple Pay | £10 | n/a | 0% | n/a |
| Bank Wire | £10 | £10 | 0% | 2-5 Days |
It’s not a huge list of payment methods available at LeoVegas Sports as you can see, but if we look at it in terms of payment ‘types’, there are options for punters who prefer using bank and debit cards, an ewallet, and a pay by phone option. That’s going to suit the vast majority of bettors down to the ground, so for me, it’s perfectly adequate.
I have always experience really quick withdrawal and deposit times too, so even though they say withdrawals will be processed within 24 hours, I can’t remember a single instance where it has taken them longer than an hour or so to process my withdrawals. I’m sure they do sometimes get busier, and obviously bank transfers will take longer because of the bank doing their thing, but if getting your money out fast is something you appreciate in a bookie, LeoVegas are a good choice.
More important in my mind, is the level of deposit protection LeoVegas’ customers can enjoy, and i’m happy to say that they do more than is required by them in the terms of their license, meeting the UKGCs ‘medium’ protection levels. It means that, should the company suddenly go under, you have a chance at getting any money in your account back.
A lot of bookies don’t go as far as LeoVegas have with this, which shows the kind of company they are.
About LeoVegas Sport: Who Are They?
Back around 2010, mobile technology was really starting to take off, with smart phones improving, the recently launched iphone making ‘apps’ widely popular, and people beginning to do more and more of their online business via their phones.
However, the online gambling industry hadn’t really embraced this new way of doing things yet, which is how Gustaf Hagman and Robin Ramm Ericson spotted a gap in the market in 2011.
They developed LeoVegas to be the first online casino to be optimised for and focused on mobile use, and launched in 2012. Obviously, these days every bookie on the planet has an app and a mobile optimised site, but when LeoVegas launched, it was a big deal.
This is why the brand saw the number of depositing customers increase by 100% or more every year from 2013 to 2015, with their entry into the UK market in 2014 helping to keep those numbers high, and making them a very popular company when they launched on the stock market in 2016, valued at over $1 billion.
It was in that same year that LeoVegas first launched their sportsbook, again as a mobile first product, which they were able to do with more autonomy since they had their own technical platform which they had launched a year earlier.
Given the name of the brand and their history as an online casino, the sportsbook wasn’t an obvious direction for expansion, and initially the betting community didn’t seem too sure about them.
The fact that LeoVegas kept winning industry awards will certainly have helped people come around to the idea of betting with a casino company though, and slowly but surely, punters gave them a go.
Over the next 5 years or so, the group went about acquiring other brands and support companies, hoovering up licenses for jurisdictions all over Europe, and expanding in many different directions. Yet despite all of their apparent success, the market value of the company had declined due to falling profits despite increasing revenues.
In 2023, they were acquired by MGM Resorts International as a way for MGM to access the British market. LeoVegas Group still runs as its’ own entity within the larger MGM business though.
The LeoVegas Group now operate 9 different brands, some focussing on sports betting and others on casino, and employ around 700 people in offices located in Malta, Sweden, Italy, Poland and the UK.
Who is LeoVegas Sports Recommended For?
I would go as far as to say that you have to be a mobile bettor to get the best out of LeoVegas Sports. The desktop site is just not my cup of tea at all, but on mobile, it’s a different story.
It’s also a great bookmaker for people who either already enjoy betting on niche sports, who want to bet on something more obscure that they are struggling to find odds for elsewhere, or someone who is interested in trying something new. I couldn’t quite believe the range of sports categories available here.
It’s perhaps not the best place for more serious punters who do hours of research before making their bets, as there just aren’t those sorts of resources here, but on the other side of that coin, it’s a very good place to bet for people who can’t be bothered shopping around for the very best odds, because they will usually be on the right side of average or better at LeoVegas.
I would finish this section by saying that anyone who has been put off in the past by the brands’ reputation as an online casino, would do well to at least have a quick look at what the site (well, the app) has to offer. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Customer Support
If 24/7 support is important to you, then LeoVegas will definitely tick that box.
This is available via email or live chat, but there is no phone support, so it’s an online only service here. That’s not unusual in the modern world though, and I prefer using a live chat wherever possible anyway, as it means you can get on with other things while discussing whatever the issue is with the support agent.
Opening live chat will present you with a self help chat bot type thing first, but you can just click the ‘contact us’ button to skip that and go straight to an agent. They pick up and answer really quickly too; i’ve never had to wait 5 minutes between replies when contacting LeoVegas like I sometimes do with other brands, but there is a helpful notification sound when a new message comes in anyway, so even if you went into another tab to do something else you wouldn’t miss the replies.
There is an FAQ style help section too, which is searchable thankfully, so you can quickly find any answers you need if they are in there. It’s categorised too, and although there aren’t a vast number of questions and answers in there all of the obvious angles are covered. All answers come with a link to the contact area too, in case you need more help.
What I really like about LeoVegas Sports’ support service is that they come across as being very happy to be contacted. Some bookies hide these details and make you work hard to get in touch, but LeoVegas have all the options easily available and even steer you towards contacting them, which just shows that they really are happy to help.
How to Contact LeoVegas
- Name: LeoVegas Sports
- Registered Company Name: LeoVegas Gaming PLC
- UK licence ref/No: 39198
- URL: www.leovegas.com
- Live Chat: Available onsite
- E-Mail: [email protected]
- Phone: Not Available
- Twitter: @LeoVegasUK
- Registered Company Address: Level 7, Plaza Commercial Center, Bisazza Street,
Sliema, SLM 1640, Malta