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👍Betting industry in Nigeria – general description
Best Betting Sites in Nigeria
The betting industry in Nigeria has gone from brick and mortar shops that were the only practice in the early days to the inclusion of betting sites – and there are a lot of those.
In the past, Nigerians were quite keen about visiting local stores to have a bet on their preferred selections, but that’s gradually changing. With the rise of more bookmakers in Africa’s most populous nation, interest has shifted to the provider sites. Many Nigerian punters find the convenience of having a bet in the comfort of their home irresistible.
The betting industry in Nigeria has become highly competitive, and old guards like Operator X are continuously on their toes to grow their customer base. With every betting company looking for a piece of the sector’s pie, new features are being added to their platforms. With every passing day, competition grows stiffer, and this should work in favour of the Nigerian punter.
💣 Top betting sites in Nigeria
Let’s jump in with the list of top betting sites for Nigeria, with quick facts about each of the ones.
🎮 Online Sports Betting in Nigeria
There are a lot of reasons for Africa to become one of the fastest growing betting markets in the world. And Nigeria is no exception out there. High-speed Internet now increases availability in this country, so it becomes easier for companies to offer their services and for Nigerian customers to place online bets on the other side. A lot of widely known international betting companies just realized that Nigeria is a betting market with massive potential and started to introduce localizations of their official sites for players in Nigeria, with local currency and other features available.
And such an interest of huge betting companies to Nigerian market should not be a big surprise. Nigeria is a country with more than 200 million people and more than quarter (approximately 60 mln.) is a potential audience: people, interested in sports and in betting as well. It would be a great miss for any serious bookmaker not to pay attention to such a massive audience of potential customers, which is up for now considered being 2nd largest one in Africa, after South Africa.
Sports betting is one of the favorite pastimes of the youth, and that’s the market Nigerian betting sites are looking to tap into. The youth is looking at sports betting as a viable source of income, driving the industry to the top. With new easier and reliable payment systems and a never-ending list of sports and markets to bet on, sports betting sites in Nigeria are showing no signs of slowing down.
❔Are Betting Sites in Nigeria Legal?
Together with other types of gambling activities, betting in Nigeria is regulated by a special organization, which is called The National Lottery Regulatory Commission. This one deals with different issues, connected with activities, like: betting, lotteries, casinos, pools and whatever else.
So exactly this Commission is the one to regulate Nigerian laws in the spheres of gambling and betting. So, according to the present state of things, betting, lotteries, pool games and so on all are accepted to play in the country. But the law forbids to play games like roulette and slots (and some others, which are according to one unofficial but accepted classification called “games of chance”).
If we speak about gambling age in Nigeria, local laws allow to play all the players, who are over 18 years of age.
But still, even when players are allowed to use gambling sites, to operate legally, they should have an international license. The majority of international sportsbooks that operate in Nigeria up for now in 2022, are all licensed in this countries:
• Curacao.
• Malta.
• Cyprus.
• Great Britain.
So if you see a bookmaker with an international license, given by authorities of any of the countries from the list, in the majority of cases there’s a reliable and trustworthy sportsbook in front of you.
Betting Laws and Regulations in Nigeria
As it was previously mentioned, the main thing should be mentioned when it comes to gambling and betting laws in Nigeria, is that local law forbids playing games of luck, which are: slots, roulette, dice and variations of those types of games. On the other hands, sports betting and card games, based on player’s skills (not just those, based only on pure luck) are 100% legal in Nigeria.
❔Is it Safe to Bet Online in Nigeria?
When it comes to preference of players from Nigeria, they usually put safety and security to the first place in the priorities’ list. So local players enjoy betting on widely known international sites with a reliable reputation, based on safe SSL-encryption protocols. It can be easily explained: no one wants to have additional risks.
If you place a bet – it is a risk itself, so you don’t need to make it even higher, if you use so-called “noname sportsbook” where you don’t know whether you would get your money in case of successful bet or not. So make sure your sportsbook is among our top-list, introduced at the top of our review. Or at least make sure you double checked the information about reliability of the sportsbook if it is not in the list, before making a deposit, especially a huge one.
🏀 Sports Betting Odds in Nigeria
It’s not a big secret, that apart from security and reliability, while searching for a sportsbook, customers pay much attention to odds. Nigerian players are not an exception. If the odds are low, it is doesn’t matter for local players how much markers are offered or how reliable and popular the sportsbook is in other countries. All the other potential benefits never make sense if the odds are lower than other Nigerian betting sites can offer.
Concerning this matter, we would like to point out 2 international sportsbooks, available at Nigerian market: Betway and 22bet. Both ones offer competitive odds, higher than average offer at the local Nigerian market. Especially when we mention football, tennis and basketball. Here Betway and 22bet are both leaders when it comes to the level of odds.
❔ What Betting Site Should You Choose?
If you’re wondering why you should compare odds at all, the answer is simple. No two betting sites in Nigeria have the same odds. While differences can often be non-significant, you should always go for the betting sites with the best odds. In that case, we can recommend 22bet, Betway, and bet365 as the leaders on the Nigeria betting sites market with top promotions and top odds.
❔What Makes Nigerian Betting Sites Good?
For obvious reasons (we explained them a little bit earlier in our review) Nigerian betting market is a huge “piece of cake” right now. So now it’s not that easy to enter the market, unless you haven’t got something special to offer. To become a valuable player, company should introduce a service of exceptional quality for Nigerian players, as they already grown into demanding ones, knowing what it means to use great sports betting services.
So, of course it’s not all about having a license and reputation. To become a top-notch bookmaker for Nigerians, it should offer a wide range of sport disciplines and markets to place bets, both for major and minor events.
Also, best betting sites in Nigeria offer a generous bonus system. Ideal case is a sportsbook with bonuses for any type of players: both newcomers and on-going promotions for those, showing loyalty.
Another factor is customer service support quality. Ideal case is 24\7 available service with different variants to access: online-chat, e-mail messaging or phone calls.
Seems that those above-mentioned factors are basic ones for betting sites to enter a top list in Nigeria. Of course there are additional ones, but we found all of them being a pleasant addition to what was mentioned earlier (of course we mean “pleasant” only in cases when the quality of a certain factor is great for a sportsbook site).
✔️ Best Sports to Bet on in Nigeria
So, as we said earlier, Nigerian are passionate fans of sports and betting as well. Just like everywhere else in the world, football is extremely popular on African continent ad Nigeria is not an exception. So best betting sites in Nigeria of course cover top-quality football events: from EPL and European Champions League to leagues from Spain, Germany, Portugal, France.
Also, local Nigerian football is loved in the country. So Nigerian Premier League is a must-have for all the sportsbooks, operating in Nigeria. The same goes for games of Nigerian International Team in International tournaments as well as games of CAF Champions League and Confederation Cup.
Football is the most popular discipline, but not the only one, enjoyed by Nigerian sports fans. Among others we can easily mention: basketball, tennis, American football, baseball and even E-Sports. So, then we can easily state that sportsbook with these disciplines as a basis would definitely become popular among Nigerian players.
Aside from sports betting, many Nigerian betting sites offer betting on political and other events. While these aren’t as big as football, they represent a great departure and are a fun way of winning some Naira. While you might not see them as entertaining, we’re sure that you’ll love them as soon as you give them a try.
You haven’t lived until you’ve placed a bet on Eurovision, the elections in Nigeria or other African countries, or the Nobel prize. These markets are not as big and competitive as football, so they often come with excellent odds. If you’d like to profit from it all, we suggest giving them a try.
And now let’s speak about some of the most popular sports in Nigeria to bet on in details.
⚽ Football
If you’re looking for the bookmaker with the highest football odds in Nigeria, then Bet365 is the one, deserving attention. It is a simple favorite in terms of football betting, as it covers almost all the football competitions, held daily all over the planet: from top-tier European events (ECL, Europa League, EPL, Bundesliga, La-Liga, Liga1 etc). to local CAF competitions, AFC Champions League and Nigerian Premier League, making local players really happy.
🎾Tennis
When it comes to tennis betting, Nigerian players also enjoy Bet365 services, consider this one being one of the best to place tennis bets. The reasons are quite obvious: wide range of markets available, coverage of almost all worldwide events (from major ATP and WTA to minor ITF events). Nigerians are especially happy to place bets on local events, held on Nigerian courts.
🏀Basketball
For those Nigerians, enjoying basketball bets, we would like to pay attention to 22Bet. There’s highly one to compete with 22Bet in terms of basketball betting. Its line covers all the events you may ever think of as a basketball fan: from NBA and Euroleague to local African minor tournaments. On top of that, there are competitive odds to make betting even more comfortable and enjoyable.
🏈 American sports
Now we go back to Bet365, as this is the sportsbook with American sports as its true specialty. When we speak about best American sports leagues, like: NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, MLS, there’s hardly a sportsbook with even close range of offers. And here we speak about not just Nigerian betting market, but even worldwide.
🎮 eSports
Then, if we can say that there’s a sportsbook, perfectly covering all the needs of Nigerian e-Sports betting fans, that would definitely be 22bet. This site accepts Naira as an account currency and offers a wide range of e-Sports, both major and minor events from the world of DoTA2, CS:GO, LoL and a dozen of other popular cybersports disciplines.
🏇 Horse Racing
Horse Racing is another discipline with growing popularity among Nigerian bettors. So here we would like to draw attention on Betway. This bookie offers all the major horse races, held all over the world with highly competitive odds. If you’re a horse racing fan, that would definitely be a bookmaker you need to place your bets.
🔥 How We Rate the Best Betting Sites in Nigeria
We should say that it was never easy to create our top list of sportsbook, offering its services in Nigeria. The reason is simple: the level of competition now in 2022 became really high and the race to the top of Nigerian sportsbook market is pretty much competitive nowadays, even for the most famous worldwide companies. Such a tough race is great for players; as total quality of the whole market becomes higher. But for some newcomers it can be stressful and time-taking to find the one and only sportsbook for permanent playing.
Choosing a new sportsbook to become a customer has never been an easy decision at all. But with our guide it would definitely be less complicated. We’ve done a careful research of Nigerian betting market, so you don’t need to do that yourself before choosing a permanent sportsbook to create an account, make deposits and place your bets on sports events.
So all the sportsbooks in our list (which you could see at the top of the material) are perfectly legal to play in Nigeria, has got international license, all of them are reliable and trustworthy operators, that were carefully analyzed by our editors just to make sure that we can recommend its services to our Nigerian readers.
During our analysis, we check a lot of different factors, which all together make a whole picture bright and clear, whether this or that Nigerian sports betting site can be recommended to our readers.
❔What makes a good betting site?
So, now let’s dive into that features, that we analyzed in each and every Nigerian betting site to see whether it’s good enough to be recommended to our readers. During years of our work we found out exactly these features as being key factors of any bookmaker. Let’s see what are they.
✔️ Markets & Odds
The more – the better. In terms of markets and odds things are that simple. The best betting sites in Nigeria offer thousands of betting markets every day, with odds that are higher than average through the market and even if compared with other international sportsbooks.
💰 Betting Bonus, Offers & VIP
If you’re a new punter, you would definitely pay attention to sportsbook with huge welcome bonuses and some other pleasant offers, aimed at newcomers. So the best Nigerian bookmakers understand the importance of welcome bonus system and introduce a lot of such bonuses. The majority of them are bonuses for 1st (sometimes also 2nd -5th) deposit, but sometimes we can even find no-deposit bonuses with no need to add your own money into account just to try out bookmaker’s services for free, without any risks to lose own money.
📺 Live betting options
Nowadays we think that like 99% of all the sportsbooks offer live betting options, it’s definitely a must-have thing. But the other thing is that not all of them introduce live sections with great quality: high odds, wide range of sports events and markets. Unfortunately, some of the betting platforms in Nigeria underwhelm massively here. But as always, best ones still match all the above mentioned requirements for high quality of live betting section of the site.
💰 Payment options
Financial market of Nigeria is on a massive raise. So even like once a month you can see a new payment method available out there: cards, e-wallets and other things of the kind. So the best bookmakers for local Nigerian punters should pay attention to it and quickly react, trying to introduce both internationally accepted methods and the ones that are comfortable and convenient to use exactly for Nigerians.
📱 App, Design and Usability
It’s 2021, and everything’s gone mobile, including sports betting. Our recommended Nigeria betting sites either have a mobile app or mobile-optimized websites that offer unbeatable on-the-go sports betting.
With more Nigerian punters placing bets using their mobile devices, a good betting platform should have a mobile-friendly site that is seamless to use for everyone.
🔐 Security and Reputation
We never rate or review sports betting sites without a license. All recommended bookies on this page are fully legit.
💁♂️ Customer Support and Service
The importance of good customer service is often underrated. However, we rank it high in our reviews, with all of our recommended betting sites offering high-quality 24/7 support via email and live chat
🆕 New betting sites in Nigeria
The betting industry in Nigeria has changed a lot recently. New players have come on board, and with them, new betting pages. Everyone is looking to get the ever-enthusiastic Nigerian punters to use their platforms. This has brought about a transition from the old ways of doing things. Some new betting sites now offer a diverse selection of markets, interesting innovative features that might reduce the risk involved, and mouthwatering bonuses.
A clear case of the innovation of new betting pages can be seen in the addition of the ‘Cash-out’ button which allows you to take your stake and part of your winnings depending on the progress of your selection.
There’s the ‘if one cut, we go still pay you’ offer by some betting pages – if your accumulator misses by one, you’ll still get rewarded. Of course, this has certain clauses attached such as the number of games, the minimum odds to qualify, and others.
Beyond the additions, many new bookmakers have reduced the minimum staking amount as well as tied up financial loose ends. On some of these sites, you could use as low as N10 to bet on your preferred outcome. This is a game-changer in an industry where you need to place bets with a minimum of N100 or N50, depending on the sportsbook.
Also, you’ll love the fast-paced deposit and withdrawals offered by some new betting sites. It’s certainly a pleasant development since it took days for such transactions to be concluded in the past.
❔What are the regulations that guide bet in Nigeria?
Despite the steady rise of betting companies in Africa’s largest economy, there are stringent regulations put in place to ensure these entities are on their toes.
The National Lottery Regulatory Commission is the government agency responsible for overseeing the activities of these betting companies, ensuring they keep to their end of the bargain. The agency screens new entrants based on their financial strength and their business model before presenting them with a license.
Since the National Lottery Act, 2005, and the relevant aspect of the Criminal Code permits only skill-based gambling as well as the possible places where such can be set up, the buck stops at the table of the regulatory agency to confirm which companies are eligible and those found wanting.
Considering the archaic nature of the laws relevant to betting in Nigeria, loopholes have been identified especially as it concerns online platforms. This has given room for some betting sites that are incapable of meeting the minimum requirement set by the National Lottery Regulatory Commission to operate.
🖥️ Nigerian betting sites registration procedure
As for any bookmaker site, to become a new customer, you always need to create an account first. Creating an account on a betting portal isn’t difficult. You could use either your mobile device or a computer to register. Here’s our step-by-step guide to become a member of any Nigerian bookmaker:
1. Visit the homepage of the betting site, and click the ‘Register’ button.
2. Fill the form, check the box – you should read the terms and conditions (don’t act like the average Nigerian) and click the ‘Proceed’ or ‘Create Account’ button.
3. Once you have registered your account, you’ll receive a confirmatory email or message depending on the particulars provided.
❔Why are bonuses and promotions important for Nigerian punters?
Unlike betting shops, betting sites in Nigeria have no other option to draw punters to their services unless they use bonuses and promotions. And that’s perfectly fine as long as the bonuses are fair. Unfortunately, not all betting sites will offer fair terms on their free bets and other types of offers.
The good news is that our recommended Nigerian betting sites have the best bonuses and promotions you can claim online.
❔What are the Advantages of Sports Betting Bonuses and Promos at Nigerian sites?
There’s a very simple answer to this question – you essentially get extra money to place bets on your faves or explore new markets. What you do with it is completely your choice unless the betting sites have the bonus tailored for a specific market. Free bets are usually available across a range of markets, so you can try some new ones that you’ll end up loving.
Before you can use them to your advantage, though, you need to learn more info on the potential bonuses and promotions you can earn at the best Nigerian betting sites.
🔝 Best betting sites in India – our top-3 rankings
While it can be difficult to figure out which bookmakers in Nigeria have your interest at heart, we got you covered. On betting-sites-nigeria.com you can find only the best betting portals that are perfect for the Nigerian market.
At betting-sites-nigeria.com we made highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each Nigerian betting platforms – both foreign and local – so you’re not at crossroads regarding the offering of each of them.
While some betting companies might have restrictions on the countries that can access their platform, the ones posted on our site accept users from Nigeria – we made sure of that.
Following our assessment of some outstanding bookmakers based on their attributes, we have compiled the best betting platforms in the list visible at the top of the page for your perusal. All of them of course have a focus on football betting and therefore recommended betting sites for football.
So if you’re here for the top 3 rankings of best betting sites in Nigeria, here it is:
• Betway.
• 22bet.
• Bet365.
These are top-quality betting sites, perfectly legal for Nigerian punters, introducing local currency, all the local sports championships (as well as all the top-tier worldwide events), familiar and comfortable for Nigerians payment methods. So the team of editors of betting-sites-nigeria.com can easily recommend any of these 3 as well as other top betting sites, which were listed at the beginning of the article.