Amy Howe Out at FanDuel—Was It the Right Move?
FanDuel Group CEO Amy Howe is stepping down, in a move that some reporting has characterized as an ouster amid poor company performance. While it’s true that share prices are down nearly 60% year-over-year for FanDuel’s parent company, Flutter, it’s less clear that FanDuel is to blame, let alone Howe herself.
Leadership changes are part of the game for publicly traded companies. Investors are as fickle as sports fans, and calls to “fire the coach” are inevitable when things aren’t going to plan. It may well be the case that Howe has been forced out due to disappointing earnings, but we won’t learn that from the carefully-worded statements coming from her or her now-former employer.
What we can do is look at the company’s current situation and ask whether it’s as bad as it looks and whether anything better could have been expected in the circumstances.
Two things are undeniable: the U.S. gambling market as a whole has not been living up to expectations, and Flutter’s stock has performed even worse than most of its U.S. rivals. However, FanDuel is only one component of Flutter, whose other subsidiaries have far more international exposure than those other companies. And, as tough as things have been in the U.S., they’ve been even tougher abroad.
Net earnings for FanDuel were down for the quarter, but that’s largely due to the investments being made in FanDuel Predicts, which have yet to see any significant return. That’s a strategy that comes not from Howe, but from her boss, Flutter CEO Peter Jackson.
FanDuel Has Strengthened Its Lead in a Difficult Market
So, what of FanDuel itself? Revenue was up 6% year-over-year in Q1, almost exactly in line with overall growth for the combined U.S. iGaming and online sports betting markets. Betting handle was down, but that’s also part of a larger trend, caused in part by new competition from prediction markets.
FanDuel hasn’t been beating the U.S. market trend, then, but neither has it been falling behind. Moreover, much of the market growth has come from challenger brands like Fanatics, Hard Rock, and BetRivers. The other two-thirds of the Big Three—BetMGM and DraftKings—have both lost market share, so holding steady looks like a win for FanDuel, especially as it means its hold on the number-one spot is strengthening.
Not all states report revenue for individual brands. But Michigan and New Jersey can be seen as representative of iGaming and online sports betting taken together. In both, we see that FanDuel slipped a little from 2024 to 2025, but has held steady since then, while BetMGM has given back last year’s gains, and DraftKings is considerably worse off than it was in 2024.
Note: Market shares include co-owned brands, such as Golden Nugget for DraftKings and PokerStars for FanDuel.
FanDuel Beats DraftKings Head-to-Head
Connecticut also provides a useful head-to-head comparison with DraftKings. It’s usually seen as FanDuel’s main rival because of their similar histories and target markets. Howe’s strategy can be characterized as more conservative than DraftKings’, yet in Connecticut we can see the benefits of that.
For the first 15 months in that market, DraftKings spent extravagantly on promotions to win the customer-acquisition battle. In some of the early months, its bonuses for casino players exceeded the amount of money it had won from them.
As a result, DraftKings debuted with the lion’s share of the market, as measured by wagers and gross revenue. However, as soon as it started to dial back on bonuses, FanDuel caught up. It now holds a small lead in the Nutmeg State and is pressing that advantage with a promotional campaign of its own.
Was Moving to NYSE a Mistake?
If there’s a perception among investors that FanDuel is not doing well, that may come from comparing Flutter’s stock price with those U.S. competitors.
DraftKings is only down 28% year-over-year, while omnichannel companies like MGM seem to have weathered the storm and are on their way back up.
Given FanDuel’s steady performance in the U.S., we probably have to look elsewhere to understand why Flutter’s stock has plummeted as much as it has. Other European betting giants like Evoke and Entain have seen similarly precipitous declines over the last five years. Flutter, on the other hand, continued to rise up until the middle of last year.
Although the brands at the heart of the company are UK- and Ireland-facing, Flutter began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in January 2024. The move signaled a strategic shift toward what appeared at the time to be a greener pasture. At the same time, it provided American investors who’d been hoping for a FanDuel spinoff a convenient way to buy a piece of the brand.
At the time, it was a move that made sense. However, the recent drop in share prices might just be a delayed reaction to the problems abroad. FanDuel has pulled its own weight, but it’s still only 40% of the company. If the hope was that U.S. growth could fully make up for the challenges abroad, that may have been too big an ask from the start.
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