Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our 2020 preliminary results presentation. I'm here in our Hammersmith office with Jonathan. Whilst it's a shame we can't be with you in person, hopefully with the rollout of vaccines, we'll be able to meet up in 3D soon. The presentation that follows provides you with an overview of what has been a truly transformational year for the group. Later this morning, we'll host an analyst call to answer any questions you may have. Let's get started and get straight into today's presentation. I'm going to start with a brief overview of the highlights for 2020. Jonathan will take you through the strong financial performance of the group for the year. I'll come back to provide an update on the performance of our business by division, and how we are progressing against our strategic objectives.
Starting with the highlights on slide four, there is no doubt that 2020 was a remarkable year for Flutter. We completed our merger with The Stars Group in May, making us the largest online gaming operator globally. A business with unparalleled scale and geographic and product diversification. In December, we accelerated our buyout of the minority shareholders in FanDuel, something we were very keen to do given the scale of the opportunity we see in North America. We were delighted to be able to complete that transaction on highly attractive terms. We made sure that our balance sheet is fit for purpose, particularly given the opportunities we foresee to add additional businesses to the group over time. As always, we're very grateful for the ongoing support of our shareholder base in doing so.
We did all of these things whilst making sure that our first priority was the welfare of our customers and our colleagues as the world grapples with the ongoing pandemic. We mobilized quickly in March to support the well-being of our colleagues without availing of government support schemes, and we enhanced our safer gambling measures in response to lockdowns and the evolving preferences of our customers. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my colleagues around the world for their commitment and resilience over the past year. The results we've announced this morning are testament to their hard work in the face of the unprecedented challenges facing the world at the moment. I'm pleased to say that our business is performing very well. The growth we are delivering is being built on sustainable foundations with significant recreational customer growth in all our key regions.
Throughout 2020, our online AMP, or average monthly players, grew 19%, with that growth accelerating during the year. Average player growth globally was 32% in H2. Merge integration continues to progress well. I will cover updates on strategy and progress across our business later in the presentation. You'll have seen that we have upgraded our cost synergy guidance this morning. As we have said before, our number one priority is ensuring that the momentum in the business is not negatively impacted by integration work. I'm pleased that we've been able to identify further efficiencies whilst maintaining strong momentum. While performance in all regions has been strong, our ongoing leadership position in the U.S. is particularly encouraging. We are, by a distance, the largest online operator in the U.S. today. The figures I will share with you later clearly demonstrate the positive trajectory for returns in that market.
Before that, though, I'll hand you over to Jonathan, who's going to review the financial performance of the group during the year.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everyone. Just a few comments from me before we get into the numbers. We're now 10 months post-merger, and as Peter mentioned, maintaining momentum was a key goal, and our numbers, I think, pay testament to the fact that we've managed to achieve that. Additionally, the benefits of diversification and scale could not be more evident in numbers. Since joining forces in May, I've been really impressed with the way that our teams have gone about bringing the businesses together, and also the collaboration that I've seen. This is a very exciting time for Flutter, given the growth opportunities that our combination provides. In particular, we look forward to seeing how combining the various product and tech platforms will deliver growth over the next few years. We are also finding ways to do things more efficiently, as reflected in our increased cost synergy expectations.
I'll now move on to the numbers on slide six. On a pro forma basis, the group delivered an excellent performance in 2020, with revenue growth of 28% to GBP 5.3 billion. We saw strong growth across both sports and gaming. Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 1.2 billion, excluding Separately Disclosed Items, growing 16% from 2019. This growth in EBITDA was after an uplift of 36% in sales and marketing as we invested to drive customer growth. Excluding the US, Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 1.4 billion, an increase of 23%. The group delivered strong positive cash flows with free cash flow after finance costs and Separately Disclosed Items of GBP 817 million.
We ended the year with net debt of GBP 2.8 billion. Leverage was 2.3 x, down from 3.2 x at the time of merger. This reduction was due to our excellent free cash flow and our capital raises. Slide seven shows the reported income statement.
Clearly, the year-on-year revenue and profit growth metrics reflect our combination with TSG on the 5th of May 2020. I will discuss the drivers of our EBITDA performance on a pro forma basis in subsequent slides, and therefore, I will touch on items below EBITDA here. The group's depreciation charge grew 47% year-on-year or 10% on a pro forma basis. This reflects the ongoing investment we are making in new features and products for our customers. Our expansion in the U.S. also contributed to this increase. Our interest expense for the year reflects the additional debt taken on as part of the TSG deal.
Separately Disclosed Items of GBP 565 million were primarily non-cash items. This was mainly for amortization of acquired intangibles of GBP 432 million, mostly from the TSG merger. We also had cash SDIs of just over GBP 120 million from restructuring and integration costs, as well as deal fees.
Adjusted basic EPS grew 35% thanks to the TSG merger and the strong performance across our online divisions in the period. On slide eight, we disclose average monthly players, which is a new KPI that we will be reporting on a quarterly basis going forward. We have provided the KPIs and growth rates for each division by quarter in the appendices. Player volumes are obviously a key measure of the underlying performance of the business. This is particularly relevant for Flutter, given the recreational nature of many of the brands in our portfolio. This slide is a powerful demonstration of the momentum that we have delivered through 2020. We grew active customers across all divisions, delivering recreational customer growth fundamental to building a sustainable business. Across the group, our online average monthly players in H1 and H2 2020 were 5.6 million and 7.1 million respectively.
This represents year-on-year growth of 6% in H1 and 32% in H2. In our core markets, we gained market share with PPB, SBG, and Australia benefiting from the migration of retail customers to online. This was particularly pronounced in Australia, where we added over 675,000 new customers. This was achieved while seamlessly completing the migration of BetEasy customers to Sportsbet in September. PPB benefited from additional marketing investment, which has been driving customer momentum with 28% growth in H2 and 34% growth in Q4. Peter will bring you through some of the investments we have started to make in PokerStars, and while it's early days, it's pleasing to see the response of customers to this activity. In the U.S., player numbers were fantastic, almost doubling from Q1 - Q4. New state openings were a big factor, we are also continuing to see strong growth in existing states.
We hope that you find this additional level of insight into the business helpful. Slide nine shows our revenue growth by division, by quarter. You can see how momentum in the business has accelerated through the year, driven by the excellent customer momentum covered on the previous slide. Revenue growth in Q1 and Q2 was 22%, rising to 30% in Q3 and to 37% in Q4. The benefit of the enhanced diversification of the combined group is clearly evident in the quarterly trends. The revenue growth in PPB Online was primarily driven by customer growth, with a small positive benefit from sports results. Q2 for PPB Online was heavily impacted by COVID-related event cancellations, and these had a pronounced effect on the Exchange in particular, which saw revenues decline 40% in H1.
Our retail estate was closed on average for 38% of the year, with the impact clearly visible in Q2 and Q4. In SBG, more of the revenue uplift was driven by margin improvement, with positive sports results materially benefiting across 2020, particularly in Q1, where SBG had easier comparatives following Cheltenham 2019. Overall, we saw net revenue margins increase by 450 basis points, of which 330 basis points was due to positive sports results. This growth in margin was supplemented by strong levels of customer engagement across both sports and gaming, resulting in revenue growth of 32% for the year. In Australia, the 26% growth in players combined with a sports results benefit to deliver a 59% uplift in revenue.
Sportsbet's share of wallet clearly improved with retail shut. After the significant peak in activity for PokerStars during Q2, we continued to deliver revenue growth in H2 with strong customer engagement as a result of higher promotional and marketing investment, partially offset by the compliance measures we have taken to improve the sustainability of the business, as mentioned at the time of the interim results. In the U.S., we have experienced fantastic levels of growth in 2020. New state openings for both sports and gaming, combined with strong growth in existing states, have fueled the performance. The strength of Flutter's performance in 2020, along with the investment decisions that we have made, have provided us with great momentum into 2021. Slide 10 provides an EBITDA bridge for the group, excluding the U.S. This takes you from Flutter standalone 2019 EBITDA to the combined groups pro forma EBITDA in 2020.
Moving from left to right, we add TSG's reported results for 2019, which equate to GBP 754 million, to Flutter's standalone results for last year. We provided details at our interims on certain costs that TSG historically treated as exceptional, but which Flutter treats as business-as-usual operating costs. The main items relate to the treatment of share-based payments, professional and legal fees, and lobbying costs, and equate to GBP 46 million in 2019, excluding the U.S. A full reconciliation of this adjustment can be seen in the appendices. We then adjust for the adverse impact of foreign exchange movements during 2020, which gets us to a pro forma EBITDA for the combined group of GBP 1,139 million for 2019. Our 2020 Adjusted EBITDA of GBP 1.4 billion is an increase of 23%. SBG in Australia translated excellent revenue growth into high levels of profit growth.
The PPB retail impact can be clearly seen with the 36% revenue reduction leading to lower profits, given the relatively fixed cost nature of retail and the fact that we continued to pay our staff throughout. When open, our shops in the U.K. performed strongly, benefiting from the closure of other retail gambling venues, and we continue to see a good opportunity for our well-invested estate to win market share over time. PPB Online saw a profit reduction in H1, but delivered a marginally higher EBITDA in H2 2020 over H2 2019, even after significant marketing and product investment to grow the customer base. For PokerStars, after an excellent first half, H2 saw us increase our level of investment in the business. This investment was in promotional and marketing spend to drive growth in customers and in our product and tech platform. This increased investment reduced our profitability in H2.
Moving to slide 11, where I want to draw out a few key points. Firstly, operating leverage. Both SBG and Australia benefited from significant year-on-year profit margin enhancement during 2020 due to operating leverage, even as we continued to invest to improve customer propositions and support scale. The strong revenue growth in both divisions led to a 600 basis point improvement in EBITDA margin, helped by marketing efficiencies. Secondly, lower margins in PokerStars. In H2, we commenced our investment program to improve the brand, product, and technology. Peter will cover more on these investments and the impacts on margins later in the presentation. Thirdly, corporate benefited from some rapid synergy delivery of GBP 12 million. Finally, we can see the increase in US. investment losses to GBP 170 million. Sales and marketing spend more than doubled to GBP 348 million in 2020, driving material customer acquisition.
Other operating costs have been controlled, growing 14% in 2020, despite the significant increase in the scale of the business achieved during the year. Moving to an update on synergies on slide 12. We are increasing our cost synergy guidance from GBP 140 million at merger announcement to GBP 170 million by 2023. This is net of reinvestment in some parts of the business, such as reallocating technology teams in PokerStars. The increase in total synergies reflects primarily our decision to move to a single brand in Australia, where customers have already been migrated to Sportsbet's platform, meaning that the majority of decisions required to deliver Australian synergies have been taken with the benefits to be realized in 2021. Similarly, in corporate, much of the work to integrate these support functions is complete. For PokerStars and UK&I, there will be a more phased benefit over 2022 and 2023.
This is due to the greater structural changes that are required in these divisions. We are also announcing CapEx synergies of GBP 20 million from consolidation of platforms and infrastructure. The cash flow for 2020 is shown on a pro forma basis. Adjusted free cash flow of GBP 1,197 million was generated from GBP 1,231 million of Adjusted EBITDA. Capital expenditure was within our guided range at GBP 252 million. We continue to invest in new features and products for our customers across all our online divisions, in tandem with the expansion into more U.S. states.
Working capital has positively benefited from the year-on-year growth of the group, particularly in Q4. Creditors have increased significantly, particularly in the area of direct costs, where point-of-consumption taxes and product fees are typically paid in the quarter after revenue has been generated. We do expect that there will be a partial unwind of this position during 2021.
Cash SDIs of GBP 120 million in the period primarily related to integration costs and professional fees from the combination with TSG. Pro forma cash interest of GBP 177 million declined by GBP 48 million due to lower levels of debt and lower interest costs. The combined proceeds of the equity placings in May and December raised GBP 1.9 billion. The GBP 1.1 billion proceeds of the December raise were used to part-fund the FanDuel minority acquisition. Net debt at December 31 2020 was GBP 2.8 billion, resulting in a leverage ratio of 2.3 x, with more detail on this provided on the next slide. We retain a robust balance sheet with relatively long maturities on our facilities and significant headroom on our covenants. Following the merger and the refinancing of Flutter's facilities at that point, the group's combined cost of debt reduced 72 basis points to 4.18%.
Given the credit quality of Flutter, we would expect to reduce the cost of debt further in the future. There is a step-down in the make-whole costs for the $1 billion of senior unsecured notes in July 2021, and this should present us with a good opportunity to refinance this element of the debt. Additionally, we will look at the opportunities around the TLB. Savings on these two elements of our debt will clearly depend on the state of the credit markets at the time of any refinancing and our ratings position. Finally, from me, slide 15 provides an update on current trading and some technical guidance. The earlier slides have highlighted the positive momentum that the business has carried forward into 2021.
Trading has been strong, with revenue growth of 36% to February the 21st versus the comparable period in 2020 due to the strong momentum in our online divisions. Sports results have also been favorable versus expectations, particularly in the U.K. and Ireland. COVID restrictions continue to impact our retail business in the U.K. and Ireland. The latest government guidelines suggest that our U.K. shops may reopen in mid-April, while it looks like it could be May at the earliest before we are able to reopen our Irish shops. For each month that our U.K. estate is shut, we anticipate an EBITDA loss of GBP 5 million, while in Ireland, the monthly loss is expected to be GBP 4 million. You may have seen there are proposals in Germany to introduce a 5.3% turnover tax on online poker and slots from July the 1st this year.
While the tax is yet to be ratified, if it does come into effect, we believe it would effectively make the German online gaming market commercially unviable for regulated operators, with the taxes being equivalent to significantly greater than 100% of gross revenue. In our view, the consequence of such a change would be to push consumer activity offshore and into the black market. We believe such an outcome runs contrary to the goals of the German authorities, and we will be doing all we can to highlight this risk. The financial impact of such change would depend on how it is implemented and what, if anything, we could do to mitigate the charge. Our initial estimate is that the contribution impact could be between GBP 15 million and GBP 25 million in 2021 if it comes into effect on July the 1st.
CapEx is expected to be approximately GBP 300 million in 2021, with ongoing product investment. While the effective tax rate for our group ex-US is expected to be between 15% and 17%, as our share of profits from higher tax jurisdiction grows year on year. Finally, just as a reminder that we will start to report on our new four-division basis from Q1, and we'll share historic pro forma data on these divisions in advance of our Q1 trading update. With that, I'll now hand back to Peter.
Thanks, Jonathan. Before providing a detailed update on strategic and operational progress across the group, I thought it'd be useful to take a step back and talk for a moment about how we think about investment in our sector today, and why we believe scale is so important. We do not seek scale for scale's sake, but because of the advantages it bestows. In digital industries, in particular, scale is critical. Market leaders enjoy superior economics, which in turn allow them to continuously reinvest in their product propositions and technology platforms. If that investment is well executed with the end customer in mind, it leads to an improved customer proposition. That in turn leads to market share gains and higher revenue growth versus competitors.
With a decent proportion of the group's cost base being relatively fixed in nature, we benefit from great operating leverage, which provides us with a profit we need to reinvest in the business. This virtuous circle of investment has made Flutter what it is today and will underpin our approach as we continue to expand globally. An important but subtle point when thinking about how this impacts on our strategy, it means that number one position is far superior and preferable to the other podium positions. You'll see us striving for more gold medals. Slide 18 is one you'll be very familiar with, a summary of our four-pillar strategy. I won't dwell on the progress we've made under each of these pillars here, as I'll talk more about what we've done in the coming slides.
Suffice it to say that we significantly accelerated delivery of our strategy across all four pillars during 2020, thanks in particular to the TSG transaction and the success we're continuing to deliver in America. Underpinning our entire strategy is a determination to build a business that is truly sustainable by challenging ourselves to ensure that we introduce the highest standards of player protection. Slide 19 covers the significant strides we've made in the area of safer gambling in 2020. We expanded the size of our safer gambling teams with increased investment in safer gambling technology across the group. We advocate a triple-step approach to consumer protection that focuses on affordability. Firstly, we believe that our customers' affordability journey should begin at registration, where we apply appropriate spend limits for customers with specific financial profiles. Our second is ongoing and extensive real-time monitoring of all customers through our safer gambling controls.
Finally, we acknowledge the need for spending backstop if, on the rare occasion, the first two layers of protection miss someone at risk of harm. This will ensure runaway losses cannot rack up, and we have the mechanism to step in and intervene at the right time. By employing such a system, we believe that meaningful player protections are in place, and already we're seeing the benefits of this triple-step approach. In PPB, one-third of customers who we've had a safer gambling interaction with have gone on to use a safer gambling tool, such as a deposit limit or timeout. At SBG, 40% of revenue in 2020 came from customers with a deposit limit already in place. What I believe our 2020 performance demonstrates is that we can grow a sustainable business without a reliance on high-value customers.
Our revenue growth in H2 was almost entirely driven by growth in our recreational customer base. As part of the consultation period around the U.K. Gambling Act, we are obviously sharing these perspectives with the Gambling Act review. We have dedicated substantial internal resources to the review led by Ian Proctor, and hope that a balanced framework is designed that will protect vulnerable customers while allowing the many who enjoy a bet to continue to do so safely, particularly given the structural shifts occurring in our sector today. Nowhere has that shift been more strikingly evident than in our core markets of the U.K., Ireland, and Australia. The chart on the left-hand side of slide 20 shows how changes in people's discretionary spend has affected some key parts of the leisure and entertainment sector in 2020.
As we referenced last year, the pandemic has led to an acceleration in the migration of customers from retail to online, a trend that we believe plays to the strengths of our recreational brands around the world. The U.K. is a good example. While only one of our three brands has any retail presence at all, accounting for just 5% of shops, we are seeing Flutter brands attract over 40% of the retail customers that have migrated online. Encouragingly, based on what we've seen historically, when a customer migrates online, they tend to get better product and value propositions than they've been used to in retail, and our expectation is that many will remain online with us as lockdown ease and retail reopens.
In the meantime, we are continuing to make substantial ongoing investment as we strive to deliver ongoing player growth like that seen across our core markets in H2. With structural trends working in our favor, there is a real onus on us to execute upon our strategy well. In the U.K. and Ireland, where we will continue to operate three brands, our focus is on leveraging the expertise of both the SBG and PPB teams to drive growth across all brands. We call this a complement and compete model, and the early signs are very promising. I've been really impressed by the collaboration I've seen between the teams from day one. Interestingly, as can be seen in the chart on the left-hand side of slide 21, player overlap between our brands is relatively low by industry standards.
2020 was a clear example of how our two recreational brands can deliver strong growth while the brand teams share best ideas. This allows us to deliver top-line growth, achieve greater scale, and in turn, delivers the efficiencies Jonathan spoke about earlier. In Australia, our enhanced scale and well-executed migration of BetEasy customers across to Sportsbet is really paying off. The chart in the middle shows just how well the migration went, with over 90% of BetEasy customers by value engaging on the Sportsbet platform in the three months post-migration. The integration work in Australia is now complete, and as Jonathan referenced, the incremental synergy benefit from the move to one brand has also been material. What is most pleasing is that in each of these core markets, we've grown market share whilst advancing our integration work.
That was a key priority when we announced the deal with TSG. That remains the case today. I said at the time of our interim results that we'd share more detail with respect to our strategy for our international division at this results announcement. The next two slides do just that. Our international division comprises PokerStars, Adjarabet, and Betfair International. One initial priority was to determine what our brand strategy would be in international markets going forward. The decision was relatively straightforward, with PokerStars' brand awareness in many key markets far exceeding that of Betfair. As such, it will be our lead international brand. Where Betfair enjoys strong recognition, we'll continue to promote the brand as a sports-led proposition, most notably in Spain, Italy, and LATAM.
In August, we spoke about how we would need to significantly increase our level of investment in PokerStars after years of underinvestment in technology, brand, and product. That investment will be multi-year and will focus on stabilizing the tech platform, modernizing the poker product, simplifying customer journeys, and improving our digital marketing capabilities. We know that when we invest in marketing and player generosity, customers respond over time, so we intend to hold these levels of investment. The good news for us is that we have some terrific assets at our disposal with which to grow the business, and direct casino investment is a key tenet of our new strategy for the business. The quality of our casino product is excellent. We have over 1,500 titles, of which 100 are proprietary, designed by our own in-house studios.
We have the expertise to deliver strong direct casino acquisition in a way that PokerStars has not in the past. We are already seeing the benefits of early investment in direct acquisition, with the number of direct casino activations trebling from 2019 - 2020. This partially drove the 37% increase in PokerStars casino revenue in 2020. While, of course, lockdowns have played a big part in driving the growth, we're seeing encouraging signs when it comes to retention on the casino side of the business. The final part of our international strategy centers on pursuing further bolt-on acquisitions that will allow us to expand the size of our addressable market. We see good opportunities to expand our international presence further through M&A, encouraged by the success of our Adjarabet acquisition since we acquired that business in early 2019.
Where we can find strong national players with well-recognized brands and competitive moats around their businesses, we will seek to add them to the Flutter portfolio. Our experience with Adjarabet is that the group can turbocharge the growth of businesses like it by providing operational expertise and incremental product. A recent example of the types of investments we will look to make is our acquisition of an initial 50.1% stake in the Indian online rummy and DFS operator Junglee. Junglee provides skill-based games in India, and whilst its core product offering today is rummy, we see an opportunity to leverage the group's expertise in DFS to grow that product in India also. As has been the case with other acquisitions we've completed in recent years, the deal is structured in a way whereby we can increase our holding to 100% over time through use of put and call options.
We will continue to be disciplined in the investments that we make and see good prospects for future investments around the world. Now turning to America. The U.S. remains the most exciting market opportunity for the group today. Our U.S. execution remains very encouraging. We've retained our position as the number one player in the market, and it is clear that the size of the prize is getting bigger all the time. We now believe that Flutter's total addressable market in the U.S. will be over GBP 20 billion in 2025. That is a significant increase from the GBP 12 billion estimate that we shared previously. This increase reflects the trends we're seeing in the states in which we're already operating, including a higher customer spend, better-than-expected retention rates across both sportsbook and casino, and higher levels of cross-sell.
These trends result in higher customer values, increasing the prospective value of the states we expect to regulate. The increased TAM also reflects our expectations around continued favorable regulatory momentum. We saw such a change in Illinois during 2020, with the suspension of in-person player registration following the outbreak of the pandemic. We anticipate further positive change to come as more states look to address budget deficits by seeking new sources of tax revenue. The regulation of sports betting and gaming is increasingly seen as a win-win by states who can better protect consumers while collecting tax revenues at the same time. Our new estimate of TAM assumes that the addressable population for sportsbook and gaming will be 65% and 16%, respectively, with the biggest change being the addition of Texas to the list of states that we think will regulate sports betting over time.
It is important to note that GBP 20 billion is not a ceiling on this market size, as we believe there will be a long runway of growth for existing states beyond 2025. Furthermore, the opportunity for FanDuel increasingly looks like it could extend outside the U.S., with the recent regulatory progress in Canada. In the long run, there's a path to a total North American TAM of more than GBP 34 billion, making it critical that we continue to execute well in this market. For us, podium position in America is not our core objective. Ultimately, we believe that being number one in a market of this size can bring disproportionate benefits, which is why we are so determined to invest to win that gold medal. Jonathan outlined how we more than doubled our marketing spend in 2020 in the U.S. to GBP 348 million.
It's important to recognize that a key reason we are able to make this significant investment is due to the scale and operating leverage we already enjoy. We finished the year with a 40% share of the sports betting market, a 20% share of the online gaming market, and a 31% share overall. We are the first operator to reach the milestone of over $1 billion in gross gaming revenues, and we believe our scale can help us to compound our advantage as we continue to expand in this market. On the next slide, we provide an update on how the returns profile is developing for us in America. In March 2019, at our U.S. Investor Day, we said we expected each sportsbook state would follow a J-curve returns profile, with an upfront investment in the initial years, followed by this investment being paid back over time.
The chart on the left-hand side of slide 25 sets out what the J-curve now looks like for all customers we acquired in 2018 and 2019 from the launch of our first sportsbook in New Jersey and subsequent launches in Pennsylvania, in West Virginia, and in Indiana. The dark blue line shows the cumulative contribution from these customers. As a reminder, contribution is revenue, less cost of sales and marketing, and is a measure of profitability before deduction of fixed costs, which will be spread over an increasing number of states over time. The 2018 and 2019 customer cohorts generated over GBP 90 million in positive contribution during 2020. This is after in-year retention investments of almost GBP 100 million in free bets and marketing spend. There are two key drivers of this positive contribution.
The first was our ability to acquire early cohorts of customers at scale by leveraging our DFS database. The database brings with it a structural cost advantage. We also invested early in direct acquisition, leveraging the strength of the FanDuel brand across the U.S. The second has been our ability to keep our customers engaged through offering a superior product. The fact we can offer the best sports betting product in the market means that we're seeing retention rates more than 1.8x the average of our mature brands in the U.K. This increases the lifetime value of our customers. The contribution we generated from these early customers is helping us fund the virtuous circle of reinvestment in those states. We more than doubled our customer base in these states in 2020.
New Jersey, the most mature state, generated a total contribution of over $50 million in 2020, which funded customer acquisition elsewhere. What this tells us is that early advantage can compound our strength in states yet to come. Slide 26 lays out clearly where our US business stands today. In 2020, our revenue was 1.4 x that of our next nearest competitor, and we exceeded the revenues of the number two and number three online players in the market combined. We were the market leading operator in both sportsbook and gaming in Q4, with a 40% and 20% market share, respectively. 2020 was also a record-breaking year for our TVG business as we saw the same structural trends play out in the U.S. as in other core markets. Our AMPs in TVG increased by 60% during 2020, and we doubled our market share to 20% of the overall racing market.
Our DFS business, which is an important component of our customer acquisition funnel, was challenged in the first half due to COVID. However, we stepped up our investment in DFS generosity and are now seeing a halo benefit from the increased investment in the FanDuel brand more broadly. Following the return of sport in H2, DFS activations were up 23% year-over-year, with average monthly players up 15%. In free-to-play, our Super 6 product now has a player base of over 4.4 million, with more than 1.5 Million active on a weekly basis during the NFL season. Since the season started, the Super 6 app has consistently been in the top five most downloaded free sports apps, and we have seen around a quarter of our FOX Bet sports book customers coming from the Super 6 database.
We continue to innovate when it comes to product and leverage Flutter Group capabilities. A good example is our Same Game Parlay product, which was designed in Australia and shared across the Flutter Group. This is a higher margin product, meaning as more customers choose to place the Same Game Parlay, we see an improvement in our overall net win margin. This is demonstrated through the year-on-year increase we saw in our win margin during 2020, despite the significant levels of investment we made in bonuses and free bets. This ensures we combine providing players with a cutting-edge product they enjoy, whilst also improving the returns we see within the business. We continue to have the broadest range of betting markets and best in-play offerings in the market.
With FanDuel now sitting on our own accounts and wallet, we've been able to unlock further cross-sell potential via smoother customer journeys. We've begun migrating individual states to our own in-house sports betting platform, with our second state now successfully complete, and are targeting the start of the 2021 NFL season to complete this migration. This will bring increased flexibility and stability to our platforms and further expand the features we can offer our sports betting customers. The final US slide shows how we're performing year-to-date. You can see on the left-hand side of the slide that 2021 is off to a phenomenal start, with sportsbook and casino customer acquisition in the first two months already close to 90% of our acquisition for the whole of 2020.
We are continuing to refine our state launch playbook and are now live in both Michigan and Virginia, bringing our state tally to 10 for online sportsbook and three for gaming. We've been really pleased with our performance to date in these states. We had a leading 28% share of sports handle in Michigan in January, with a focus on maximizing customer acquisition in those initial days post-launch. We had a significant number of players register with our sportsbook before we went live in Michigan, and we currently have more customers active on our gaming platforms in that state than we do in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, despite only being live for less than six weeks. Just as in other markets, marquee sporting events are key customer acquisition opportunities, and the Super Bowl was no different in 2021.
We acquired more customers across our sports book and gaming businesses during Super Bowl week than we acquired in all of 2019. While the FanDuel sports book app was ranked number three in the US App Store across all free download apps on the day itself. The power of our customer acquisition funnel remains clear. 41% of our customers since we originally launched in 2018 have come from our daily fantasy sports database. Direct acquisition, though, is also strong, with the FanDuel branding drawing 54% in prompted brand awareness in 2020. What has surprised us further is the ongoing growth in more mature states. We acquired over 100,000 new customers during Super Bowl week in states that were launched before 2020. Overall, we had over 1 million paid customers active on Super Bowl Sunday across our platforms, and we're determined to continue to build on this success.
In summary, I'm delighted with our performance in 2020. We advanced all of our key strategic objectives, protected the momentum in the business, and have positioned the group well for further growth opportunities. We are more focused than ever on ensuring that our business is being built on sustainable foundations. As Jonathan mentioned, 2021 has started well, with good momentum across the group. While it is early days, we look forward to the rest of the year with confidence. Thank you for listening. I look forward to joining you all shortly to answer your questions.