Founded in 1997 by Anders Ström, Unibet boasts around ten million users spread across more than one hundred countries. The company’s first website went operational in 1999 and they launched their betting service four years later. They had a mobile version of their site up and running by 2004, showing that they were always at least in line with the developments in how people were betting, if not ahead of the curve altogether. Unibet made moves to buy up different smaller bookmaking companies, such as their acquisition of Bet24, a Danish company, in 2012. They became something of a conglomerate under the name Unibet Group Plc.
Those acquisitions have continued at a pace over the years, including the addition of Bingo.com Limited in 2014 and the purchase of Stan James in 2015. Interestingly, this latter deal only included the online business and not the numerous high street stores. Instead these were re-branded as Megabet. In 2017 Kindred Group, as Unibet Group had become known the year before, also purchased 32Red. If you’re like me and enjoy having numerous different accounts with various bookmakers then you’ll find it interesting that so many come under the umbrella of a company that started life as a relatively modest Swedish bookmaker.
Existing Customer Offers from Unibet
- Unibet: Bet Builder Boosts
- Unibet: Racing Acca Boosts
- Unibet: Racing Uniboosts
- Unibet: Racing Money Back
Sports Betting at Unibet
The Site
I’m a really big fan of Unibet’s website. I didn’t think I would be when I first started using it, to be honest, mainly because I’m a MacBook user and the style of the website is very reminiscent of the newer Windows operating system. Everything on the homepage is compartmentalised, meaning that events are put into their own ‘box’, so to speak. It’s an odd approach but it really works, making navigation simple and allowing you to find exactly what you’re looking for really quickly. This is aided and abetted by a colour scheme of black, white and green, meaning everything is easily decipherable.
You’ll find links to In-Play events and ones starting soon on the lefthand side of the page, underneath which you’ll also see the most popular events to bet on at any given moment, plus a list of all sports covered. Clicking on a sport will take you to a list of In-Play events, if there are any, which sit on top of all other major bets you can place broken down into categories. The site really zips along in my experience, never making you wait for anything to load and always loading up requested pages as quickly as your device and internet will allow. Genuinely, a real winner.
Features
Unibet boast that they offer Live Streaming of over 40,000 events, including all horse racing run in the UK and Ireland. You’ll also be able to watch selected football matches from Europe’s big leagues, such as La Liga and the Bundesliga. They claim that their In-Play betting system is ‘market leading’, and whilst I couldn’t comment on the veracity of that claim I do think that it’s a very good system indeed. As with most other top bookmakers that have In-Play betting available, Unibet allow you to Cash Out your bet if you don’t like the way the event that you’ve placed a wager on is going.
What to Bet On
Unibet cover all major sports that you can think of, with a particular emphasis on football, tennis and racing – both of the horse and greyhound variety. Given the company’s origins in Scandinavia it probably shouldn’t be all that surprising to see that they also offer odds on some slightly less common sports.
These include the likes of bandy, futsal, floorball, pesapallo and trotting. If you like to bet on major contemporary events then you’ll be pleased to see politics and TV both covered, as well as what they somewhat euphemistically call ‘novelty’ bets.
Other Products
No major bookmaker is worth their salt any more if they don’t offer punters some added extras, so there’s no great shock in the fact that Unibet have an online casino attached to their sportsbook offering. You can play standard computerised casino games there or, if you prefer things to look a little more realistic, you can opt for a live casino with real human dealers. Unibet also offer poker, bingo and even lottery-style betting, should you prefer to bet on something slightly different from the usual.
Banking & Limits
Unibet accept all major deposit and withdrawal methods, including debit cards, credit cards, paysafecard and bank transfers. They also accept NETeller and Skrill but, unlike some of their competitors, they don’t allow punters to make their first payment with either of those online money transfer services.
If you’ve read other reviews of mine then you might have noticed NETeller and Skrill being ruled out as potential deposit methods when I talk about the welcome bonus. Unibet don’t specify that you can’t use either of those options, mainly because they don’t even give you the choice to do so!
Who Are Unibet?
The better question is probably ‘Who Are Kindred Group?’, given that Unibet now comes under the coverage of this larger company. There’s some link between Kindred Group and The Kambi Group Plc, given that the latter is a spin off of the former covering the world of B2B. At the time of writing, the Kindred Group is made up of thirteen different brands, run as separate enterprises but all coming under the same bracket.
The vast majority of these brands are online gaming solutions, with most of the bookmakers having been mentioned previously in the review. The company is headquartered in Malta but has offices in countless other countries, including Australia, Denmark, Estonia, Italy and the United Kingdom. Kindred Group employs over 1,000 people and have long targeted the UK gambling market.