It will be an unusual typical weekend of watching football on t.v without a SportPesa advert coming on the screen. SportPesa is a popular bookmaker in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa, and has recently spread its wings to the UK and Isle of Mann. They have an equally visible presence through sponsorships in soccer and Formula 1. But how is the betting experience, one may ask? In this article, we’ll be reviewing the SportPesa South Africa sports betting services.
SportPesa South Africa
Landing page
The landing page of SportsPesa looks stylish and well designed. The icons and menu buttons are visible, making the page easy to navigate through. Various menu options such as Live Games, Livescore, Statistics, and others can be accessed from the top left of the page. The left sidebar gives the punter an option to select from the different types of sports offerings for betting. The mid-section of the page is characterised by match highlights. We could however not find the search bar for quickly searching for a team or league.
Sportpesa Mobile
The mobile page of SportPesa is equally sleek with a black theme. The site is adaptive and responds to the type of device used, adjusting screen size accordingly. The page is easy to navigate through. The menu button on the top left of the screen allows for access to menu options such as Live Games, Statistics and others.
The punter has an option to view the desktop version of the site, or better still, download an application should one fancy. Unfortunately, this app runs on Android devices at the moment, and versions of Android 4.1.1 or higher are supported. The lack of a search bar, however, makes it difficult to quickly search for a team or league.
Easy Navigation
SportPesa is very easy to navigate as all your important buttons are at the top, buttons like Live Games, Results and Live Score are useful and a good inclusion. However there is no option to see all the available sports, as in there is no Sports button. It’s bizarre really, as the SportsPesa sites overseas have this feature. They seem more concerned with pushing a plethora of social media icons instead of covering some of the basics. Also we were unable to find any search button, but we’ll touch on that a bit later.
Your sidebars contain the usual events like Soccer etc and the navigation to a specific event in a specific country is easy and straightforward. Clicking on any of the side menu Sports automatically populates the main page with highlights of the upcoming events for that sport. The loading times are fairly quick and it works well with the site design.
Sportpesa Betting Markets
Despite it’s slick looks and easy navigation SportPesa South Africa has some serious issues under the hood. Currently they only offer Soccer, Basketball, Tennis, Rugby Union and Cricket. SportPesa lucky numbers, Golf, Motor Sports? Nope. Once again it looks like a very lite clone of their overseas offering, missing many markets and events.
Once you’ve decided to take a bet you’ll also be severely limited with markets, we had a look a look at some of the upcoming Premier League matches and they had a whopping 10 markets each. These markets are missing things like Draw no bet, Goalscorers etc. Not exactly exotic markets but let’s hope they will be adding to this in the future as it’s very basic at the moment. We now see why they excluded a search function, as if they had one the search results would be blank.
Sportpesa Deposit Options
Deposits into SportPesa can be made through EFT, 1 Voucher or through debit and credit cards supported by VISA/Mastercard. There is an option of completing the deposit process through USSD codes for MTN and Vodacom subscribers.
Sportpesa Login
To Login to your Sportpesa account you simply need to click on the login in button. If you are having trouble accessing your Sportpesa account then click here to go directly to the site.
Welcome Offer
Kindly note that at present Sportpesa do not have a sign on offer for South African punters.
Sportpesa Registration Process
SportPesa South Africa have made an interesting choice here, when you register you receive an sms with a registration code. This seems completely unnecessary as you are not given the option to receive this by SMS. In this day and age SMS’s have become spam and SportPesa are simply adding to this. Other than that the registration process is easy and straightforward. Here’s how to get up and running.
- Click on this link you’ll be redirected right to the SportPesa registration form.
- Enter your mobile number and e-mail address to sign up.
- After you enter your personal details, click on the blue “Sign Up” Button, this will complete your registration.
Promotions
We searched high and low and could not find a single promotion on the SportPesa South Africa site. No sign up offer and no retention / weekly promotional offers either.
Fica Bonus
Sportpesa do not currently have a Fica bonus. However you can check a list of available Fica bonus bookmakers here.
Contact details and Customer Service
SportPesa customer service number : 0861047773
SportPesa customer service email : support@sportpesa.co.za
SportPesa have 24 hour customer support, which we tested and found to be very good. The support agents were friendly and responded to our email promptly. They don’t have a live chat feature yet, but their competent email support makes up for this as they respond very quickly.
Sportpesa App
Sportpesa have an android app available for free if you download it directly from their site.
SportPesa South Africa Overall Experience
SportPesa South Africa is like jumping into a Ferrari, strapping in, putting your foot on the gas only to find out that the engine is actually running on half flat AA batteries with a top speed of 5 kilometers an hour. The site is impressive from a visual standpoint and the support excellent, but the betting markets are a major letdown. We really would like to emphasize that we using the SportPesa site is a dream as it’s very well designed and runs like very few other local betting sites.
There is very little to bet on, which would be fine if SportPesa South Africa wasn’t a betting site, however it obviously is. We’d love to see it purr with some proper markets and a full offering, but for now we can’t recommend that you sign up with SportPesa as you can get some more value elsewhere, even with some of the smaller sites in South Africa.
We hope that they have some expansion plans for the future though. Additionally we did try contact them when doing this review but their response was rather generic. We can’t recommend Sportpesa as your daily bookie but they are worth having an account with.
SportPesa South Africa Review
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Bonus
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Promotions
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Site & Features
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Odds
Summary
SportPesa offers a sleek, aesthetic web page for access from both the desktop and mobile devices. The site is also easy to navigate, but that is only as far as the good side goes. SportPesa South Africa is a big let-down through its limited sports and market options on offer. We certainly hope SportPesa will make concerted efforts to increase their sports and market offerings as this is certainly not competitive with other bookies. Additionally, one equally hopes there will be promotions. It would be hard to see the competitiveness of SportPesa in the South African market without these changes.
Please punters stay away from sportpesa, they are robbing us with betting and it is hard to get money out.
How are these guys still running with their terrible betting, I’ve been watching for almost a year and they have not improved one bit!
Any news on a sportpesa welcome offer or bonus? Like their odds but need a bonus!
Nothing yet Pieter, let’s hope Sportpesa dial it up in 2019. They’ve got all the ingredients to be a good book.
Can’t believe sportpesa. They’ve got marketing and advertising everywhere and I feel for the flashy ads. The markets are very poor and I don’t understand why they don’t have more, it makes no sense. I hope they improve otherwise sportpesa won’t be seeing another cent from me.
Do you know if they plan to update or improve their markets?
I can’t believe that Sportpesa would come into South Africa with such a subpar product. I gave them the benefit of the doubt initially thinking it would improve but months later they are still a joke. How can a bookie expect to survive with such poor betting options.
Its really sad as I’ve used them overseas and they’re good there, but here they are pathetic. Please punters stay away from them and spend your money somewhere else. They are more concerned about putting adverts all over than they are about punters. If anyone from sportpesa is reading this, fix your bookie and I’ll bet with you.
Yeah very disappointing experience from start to finish.
Keeps crashing
No In play on Rugby, cricket
deposit approval took a week
Glad to see we’re spot on about them Jack. Markets non existent but it’s crazy that deposit approval took more than a week, imagine the withdrawal process!
I can’t bring myself to deposit and your comment has confirmed that. Really sad for an international company.
How to deposit funds using voucher bafethu
Is there really no bonus?
Hi Roshan, there is no sportpesa deposit bonus at the moment.
I haven’t gotten my sms from registering can you help please
Hi Mkizwe, please contact Sportpesa South Africa on one of the contact details we listed in the review. Their service is top notch.
Clearly a biased review, it’s a betting site and they don’t need to look good, they need to have stuff to bet on. Should be 2/10 at best. 5 sports to bet on is pathetic.
Lol thanks for the feedback Logan.