The Premier League Is Back. For Sportsbooks in Africa, Telegram Should Be An Essential Part of the Acquisition Playbook.
By Emeka N.
The Premier League is back, and for sportsbooks operating across Africa, the start of a new season represents one of the biggest player acquisition opportunities of the year. Millions of football fans will spend the coming months following matches, discussing teams, sharing predictions, comparing odds and, importantly for operators, placing bets.
The challenge for sportsbooks isn't finding football fans. It's finding high-intent audiences at a cost that delivers sustainable ROI. In markets such as Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, Telegram is increasingly becoming an important part of that acquisition mix.
Football audiences are already on Telegram
Telegram is built around communities. Across Africa, large Telegram channels have developed around football, sports betting, predictions, betting tips, entertainment and other highly relevant interests. Some have built substantial audiences that return throughout the day to consume and share content. For a sportsbook, that creates an interesting acquisition opportunity.
Rather than simply buying broad digital reach and hoping to find potential bettors within it, operators can advertise directly inside communities where the audience is already talking about football. And during the Premier League season, those conversations happen every day. Fixtures, team news, injuries, transfers, predictions, odds, accumulators and results continually create new reasons for fans to engage. That combination of scale, relevance and frequency is what makes Telegram particularly interesting as a performance marketing channel.
Telegram advertising doesn't need to look like traditional advertising
There is another important difference. A Telegram campaign doesn't have to be limited to conventional display advertising. Sportsbooks can create advertising that feels much closer to the content audiences already consume within football and betting communities. A campaign might include a registration offer one day, a Premier League odds boost the next and a competition or match-specific promotion later in the week.
One of the most interesting formats is betslip sharing. Instead of simply telling someone to visit a sportsbook, an operator can distribute relevant bet selections or betslips around specific matches, giving the audience something immediately actionable.
Liverpool playing on Saturday? Create a Liverpool-focused betslip.
Manchester United playing on Sunday? Serve a completely different piece of creative around that match.
A major derby? Build the campaign around the fixture.
This gives sportsbooks the opportunity to move away from running the same generic acquisition advert repeatedly and instead deliver fresh, contextual advertising throughout the football calendar.
The problem has always been scale
Telegram's fragmented nature has historically made this difficult for larger advertisers. Finding relevant channels, contacting individual publishers, negotiating placements, verifying audiences, coordinating campaigns and confirming that advertising was actually delivered can quickly become operationally intensive.
There is also risk. Buying advertising directly from unknown channel owners can expose advertisers to misleading audience claims, poor-quality traffic, inconsistent delivery and, in some cases, outright fraud. For a sportsbook trying to manage acquisition across dozens of communities and potentially several countries, doing everything manually simply doesn't scale.
That's the problem Convertly was built to solve.
One programmatic platform. Multiple Telegram communities
Convertly gives advertisers access to a vetted network of Telegram communities across African markets through one managed platform. Rather than a sportsbook having to build and manage dozens of individual publisher relationships, Convertly handles the process. We help operators identify relevant communities, plan campaigns, coordinate placements, manage publishers and provide visibility over campaign delivery. Most importantly, our fully managed solution means sportsbooks don't need to become Telegram advertising experts themselves. Tell us the market, audience, campaign and objective. We manage the rest. That can include running multiple creative formats across the network, from traditional promotional posts and acquisition offers to match-specific campaigns, odds-led content and betslip sharing.
One season creates hundreds of acquisition opportunities
The real opportunity isn't simply the opening weekend. A Premier League season provides sportsbooks with hundreds of moments around which to build campaigns. A Saturday afternoon fixture can have one message. A Sunday headline match can have another. The Manchester derby, North London derby and title-deciding fixtures can each have completely different campaigns. That makes Telegram particularly suited to an always-on acquisition strategy.
Instead of buying one large burst of generic reach, operators can continually put relevant content in front of engaged football audiences throughout the season. And because those audiences can be selected according to market, community and interest, operators have far greater control over where their advertising appears.
A new acquisition channel for African sportsbooks
Competition for players in markets such as Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya is intense. The operators that win won't necessarily be those that simply spend the most. They will be those that find new ways to reach relevant audiences efficiently and turn marketing spend into depositing players. Telegram provides access to large, highly engaged communities that many operators still aren't reaching effectively. Convertly provides the infrastructure to access those audiences safely and at scale.
With the Premier League now underway, the opportunity is clear. For sportsbooks looking for their next high-ROI player acquisition channel in Africa, Telegram deserves a place in the media plan.
And Convertly makes it easy to get started.