Betting and sport

Three models, and what each one implies

Betting on sport is legal somewhere in almost every large economy, but under three quite different constitutions.

Monopoly. Japan criminalises private gambling and then carves out, by dedicated statute, a public sector: the football lottery known as toto plus four kōei kyōgi or "public sports" — horse racing, keirin, powerboat racing and motorcycle racing — on which no private operator may take a bet. Hong Kong grants the Jockey Club an exclusive authorisation for horse racing, football and the Mark Six lottery, with betting duty of 50 per cent on football, and authorised football betting in 2003 with the stated aim of channelling demand away from illegal bookmaking. Singapore Pools operates not as a licensee but as a statutory exempt operator, required to be not-for-profit, locally based and to contribute to public causes. China permits only the state sports lottery, whose central body states that it has authorised no online platform at all, so any website offering online sports betting there is unlawful by definition. Norway keeps a two-body state monopoly — and Finland is dismantling one: licence applications opened on 1 March 2026 and privately licensed operators may take bets from 1 July 2027, with the monopoly retained for lotteries and slot machines.^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}

Licensed competition. Great Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, most of the European Union, Brazil since 1 January 2025, Colombia, Kenya, Nigeria's states and most US states license private operators under a regulator. The model is not uniform even inside itself: Argentina has no national licence at all — regulation is province by province, with the applicable permit depending on where the player is when they bet, and one province prohibiting outright — and Nigeria devolved in the same direction when its Supreme Court held in November 2024 that state governments, not the federal commission, have primary authority to license and tax betting on their own territory.^{[5] [6] [7]}

Prohibition. India moved the other way in 2025, banning all online money games — games of skill included, which was the controversy — together with their advertising and the processing of related payments, while separately recognising esports; challenges are pending. Malaysia and the Gulf states prohibit sports betting outright.^[8] The structural point is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly: the largest estimated unregulated turnover sits in prohibition jurisdictions, and the market-size figures everyone quotes for those markets are estimates of activity that nobody audits — the leading estimator's own revisions turn explicitly on "improved offshore estimates" for China and India.^[9]

What a licence actually requires

A betting licence is a continuing set of obligations, not a certificate. In Great Britain the operative instrument is the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice, breach of which exposes the operator to review of the licence and to financial penalty. The clearest and least-understood example is customer money: there is no legal duty on a British operator to protect customer funds on insolvency. The rules instead force disclosure — funds must be segregated as specified, and the operator must tell customers which of four ratings applies to it, from "not protected — no segregation" to "high protection". Since 31 October 2025 an operator holding money at a "not protected" rating must remind each affected customer every six months, stating the amount held.^[10] Participation in the national self-exclusion scheme is likewise a licence condition rather than a voluntary gesture: every British online licensee must be signed up and must check the central database before an account is opened or logged into.^[11]

Elsewhere the machinery is more technical. Germany's distinguishing instrument is a central cross-operator activity file that enforces a single deposit limit across every licensee at once, so a limit cannot be evaded by opening a second account; the joint states' authority took over licensing on 1 January 2023, and in July 2026 it introduced tiered stake limits for online slots, keyed to age and to a period of monitored, non-problematic play. Brazil's technical rules require biometric onboarding matched against the national identity database and localisation of servers in Brazil or a jurisdiction with a data-sharing agreement. Italy layers continuous reporting and platform re-certification onto a nine-year concession, awarded in a 2025 tender that ended a decade without one.^{[12] [13] [14]}

The authorised list

In several countries a licensed operator may not offer a market on any event it chooses. It may offer only what the regulator has listed, and the list is an integrity instrument.

France is the most fully documented example. Only pari-mutuel and fixed-odds betting are permitted, live betting only online, and payout ratios are capped by decree at 85 per cent online and 76.5 per cent in retail. The regulator's board fixes and amends the list of sporting events and of the types of result on which bets may be taken, after consulting the federation with the delegation for that sport and, where necessary, the sports minister; the licensed operators and the retail monopoly are equally bound. An operator wanting a new competition or a new result type must file a reasoned request, and the regulator has three months to decide. The published criteria are the substance: the event must be regularly organised, its rules accessible and including provision for publishing results; its standing and stakes are weighed; the age of the participants is weighed so as to exclude competitions open to minors, described as more easily manipulated; and the result must be objective and quantifiable rather than a matter of chance — which is why betting on whether a match produces an odd or an even number of goals is forbidden. Esports is excluded from betting by statute rather than by list.^[15]

The lists move continuously and in fine detail. A single decision of July 2026 admitted the main-card bouts of a mixed martial arts series, validated a golf market over a full eighteen holes while refusing the same market over a single hole, and permitted betting in the third tier of French football only on the five promotion play-off matches, the regular season remaining closed.^[54] [16] Italy is reported to run the same idea under a different name, the palinsesto of events and bet types the customs and monopolies agency permits; the current decrees were not consulted for this entry.^[14]

Great Britain does none of this: the Commission licenses the operator and the conduct, not the catalogue of markets, and there is no pre-approval of what may be offered. Where Britain limits youth exposure it does so through advertising and sponsorship codes — the advertising rule that a gambling advertisement must not be of "strong appeal" to children, in force since October 2022, and league codes prohibiting gambling sponsorship of academy competitions — not through a whitelist of permitted events.^[17] [18]

The money between sport and betting

Shirts. The 2026-27 season was the first in roughly two decades in which no English top-division club carried a betting brand on the front of its shirt. The change was a voluntary collective agreement made by the clubs in 2023, not a statute, and it is front-of-shirt only — sleeve and training-kit branding continue under the league's code of conduct. Belgium went further by decree: gambling advertising banned by default since February 2023, and since 1 January 2025 gambling logos barred from the front of sports shirts with a size cap of 75 square centimetres across the rest of the kit. The Netherlands prohibited gambling sponsorship of sport entirely from July 2025, with a wider advertising ban still in legislative process.^{[19] [20] [21]}

Advertising. Italy's 2018 decree remains the broadest ban in Europe, covering television, radio, press, internet and sponsorship, and is under active political challenge. Spain is where most accounts go wrong: the sweeping 2020 decree was partially annulled by the Supreme Court on 2 April 2024 for lack of statutory cover, restoring promotional activity, the use of public figures and much online advertising — what survived is the sports-sponsorship prohibition and the 01:00 to 05:00 broadcast window. Australia banned credit cards and credit-linked wallets for online wagering in June 2024, with a statutory review of that ban under way in 2026. Kenya restricts broadcast gambling advertising to overnight hours except during live sport, bars celebrity and figure-of-public-trust endorsement, and levies six per cent on advertising spend.^{[22] [23] [24] [25]}

Data. The commercially decisive relationship is not sponsorship but the sale of official live data, supplied by an effective duopoly of two companies holding exclusive feeds for most major properties. In the United States a further mechanism turns that private contract into law: several states require operators to use official league data for in-play wagering, in most cases only once a governing body notifies the regulator that it wants the mandate applied — one state's version applies without any such request. This is the substitute for the "integrity fee" the leagues asked for from 2018, a one per cent and then quarter-per-cent share of handle: no state ever enacted one, and the leagues pivoted to data mandates and commercial royalties instead. The juxtaposition at the college level is worth recording: the body whose own participants are banned from betting entirely has moved to selling data to sportsbooks through an expanded commercial deal.^{[26] [27] [55]}

What participants are forbidden to do

Nearly every code separates three offences — manipulating a competition, betting on the sport, and misusing inside information — and only the first is match-fixing. The betting prohibition is generally absolute rather than confined to the participant's own matches, and it is the one that generates the caseload.

In football the participant betting rule sits in the Code of Ethics, article 27, not in the disciplinary code's manipulation article: officials, referees, players, agents and intermediaries are forbidden from participating directly or indirectly in betting related to football, or holding any financial interest in it, on pain of a fine of at least CHF 100,000 and a ban of up to three years. FIFA also sets out the indirect forms expressly — a third party betting in their own name with a participant's money, a third party betting alongside a participant and splitting the proceeds, and a participant passing inside information to someone who then bets — which is the clearest published account anywhere of how these cases actually work. England's Rule E8 goes wider still: participants at clubs in the listed leagues may not bet on any football match anywhere in the world.^[28] [29]

Cricket's code prohibits placing, accepting or facilitating any bet on the result, progress or conduct of any match, and separately prohibits the misuse of inside information. Tennis players may not bet on tennis at any time anywhere, whether or not they are involved in the event, tennis betting companies may not sponsor or employ them, and players carry an affirmative duty to inform the people around them of the programme and instruct them to comply. The Olympic code covers athletes, referees and officials and extends the prohibition to other sports at the same multi-sport event — an Olympic swimmer may not bet on the Olympic judo — and the IOC has barred all Games-accredited persons from betting on Olympic events since 2006.^{[30] [31] [32]}

Among the North American leagues the shared rule is that you may not bet on your own sport; the variation is scope and tariff, and the broadest prohibition belongs to college sport, where it covers every sport in which the association sponsors a championship. In October 2025 a Division I committee adopted a change permitting athletes and staff to bet on professional sport; under a rarely used override procedure, more than two-thirds of Division I member schools voted to rescind it, the threshold being reached on 21 November 2025, before the change ever took effect. The total ban on betting on any sport in which the association sponsors a championship stands in all three divisions — a correction still missing from most published accounts.^[33] [34]

From alert to case: three bodies, three thresholds

A suspicious wager travels three ways at once, and the three destinations can do quite different things with it. The sports body can act against a person, under a contractual code, on a civil standard of proof. The gambling regulator can act only against its own licensee, and only for a breach of licence conditions — it has no power over a player. Police and prosecutors need a criminal offence and the criminal standard, and can reach people who are in neither the sport nor the industry. The same facts routinely produce a sporting ban, no regulatory action whatever, and either no prosecution or one that fails; reporting that treats the three as one story is the commonest confusion in the field.^[35]

Cooperation between regulators is networked soft law rather than treaty: an international association of gaming regulators with some seventy-five member jurisdictions, a European forum and a North American body which signed a partnership with each other in 2023, and bilateral memoranda between individual regulators. France is the outlier that puts the regulator inside the integrity function — the same authority that fixes the authorised list runs a standing mission against the manipulation of competitions, so the market catalogue and the integrity policy are one instrument. Britain's equivalent work sits with the sport and the operators, with the Commission acting on licensees.^[36] [15] The detection side of this pipeline — who monitors, what an alert means and what the annual numbers do and do not say — is set out on match-fixing.

Prohibited betting without any fixing

The great majority of participant sanctions worldwide involve no manipulation at all. The largest such case on record is Turkish. On 27 October 2025 the football federation announced the results of an internal audit: of 571 active referees in the professional leagues, 371 held betting accounts and 152 were actively betting, with ten referees having placed more than ten thousand bets each and one 18,227, on the federation's own account.^[59] Bans of eight to twelve months followed for 149 referees and assistants; more than a thousand players were referred to the disciplinary board, with sanctions from 45 days to twelve months; a criminal investigation ran separately. On the published record this is overwhelmingly a betting case — the conduct forbidden is holding and using an account, whatever the effect on any match — and describing a thousand players as match-fixers misstates it.^[37] [38]

The English cases show the same shape at individual scale: a Premier League forward banned for eight months and fined £50,000 for 232 admitted breaches of the betting rule, out of 262 charged, across four years;^[39] a midfielder given a suspended two-month ban for 50 breaches in a two-month period, separate from and additional to his Italian sanction;^[56] a lower-division player fined for sixteen.^[57] None was a fixing case. In cricket, a Bangladeshi player became the first woman sanctioned under the anti-corruption code in February 2025, with five years' ineligibility. Set against those, the Australian case of a player who pleaded guilty in 2025 to deliberately collecting yellow cards for a "player to be carded" market marks the boundary: that one is manipulation, and it belongs on the other page.^[40] [41]

The United States since 2018, and prediction markets

The federal statute that had confined sports betting to Nevada fell on 14 May 2018, when the Supreme Court held that forbidding states to authorise sports gambling commandeered them in violation of the constitution. The Court did not hold that sports betting must be legal; it held that Congress could not order states to keep it illegal.^[42] The market that followed is large and should be reported with its definition attached: roughly thirty-eight or thirty-nine states plus the District of Columbia permit some form of legal sports betting and about thirty permit online wagering, the discrepancies being definitional. Commercial sports betting produced revenue of USD 16.96bn on handle of USD 166.94bn in 2025, with USD 3.71bn paid in state taxes.^[43]

The prosecutions of 2025 and 2026 are live cases, not outcomes. A National Basketball Association player arrested in October 2025 has pleaded not guilty and moved to dismiss on the ground that the conduct is a sportsbook rules violation rather than a federal crime; a head coach charged in a related illegal-poker case has also pleaded not guilty, with trial listed for November 2026. Two Major League Baseball pitchers indicted in November 2025 over pitches allegedly thrown to a predetermined outcome remain on non-disciplinary leave, moved from paid to unpaid in March 2026, and have not been disciplined by the league at all; their trial is also listed for November 2026.^[44] [45]

The newest question is prediction markets — exchange-traded event contracts on sporting outcomes, which are economically bets and legally derivatives. In April 2026 a divided federal appeals court affirmed a preliminary injunction barring one state from enforcing its gambling laws against one such exchange, holding its sports event contracts likely to be swaps within exclusive federal jurisdiction; it is a ruling on likelihood of success, not a merits determination, and it binds one state. On 28 August 2026 a second appeals court went the other way, holding such contracts likely not to be swaps at all and their listing unlawful under the regulation — so there is now a circuit split, and no court anywhere has entered final judgment on the merits. The federal regulator has meanwhile sued nine states, beginning with Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois on 2 April 2026. A second platform reached the United States by a different route entirely — the acquisition of an already-designated exchange and an amended designation order, the September 2025 no-action letter having been narrow swap-data reporting relief rather than authorisation to enter the market — and restricts availability state by state at the level of the individual contract category. All of this is set out, with its sources, on prediction markets. The encyclopedic content here is not the litigation scoreboard but the gap it exposes: the licensing, advertising, self-exclusion and affordability machinery described above attaches to sportsbooks and not to exchanges, while the participant-integrity problem is identical.^[46] [47]

Harm, and how it is measured

Britain runs the most transparent measurement, and it comes with a warning attached. The Gambling Survey for Great Britain, the Commission's own official statistics, put the proportion of adults scoring 8 or more on the problem gambling severity index at 2.4 per cent in its July 2026 report, fieldwork covering 20,775 adults, and describes the figure as stable across three years. The Commission and the Office for Statistics Regulation both warn that the survey is not comparable with the older health-survey series that produced sub-one-per-cent figures: the apparent multi-fold rise is a change of instrument, not of behaviour, and any sentence setting 2.4 per cent against 0.3 per cent is a methodological error rather than a finding.^[48] [49]

The tools regulators reach for are limits, checks and exclusion. Britain's financial risk assessments began at a deposit threshold in August 2024, lowered in February 2025 and rolled out in stages confirmed in July 2026; the pilot found about 97 per cent of customers could be assessed without providing documents or taking any action, and that high-spending customers were more likely than comparison populations to show signs of financial difficulty. Self-exclusion registrations reached a monthly record in May 2026 in the run-up to the World Cup, with the under-25 cohort growing fastest.^[50] [51] Kenya illustrates that the instrument can be the tax point rather than the rate: excise duty on bets was cut from 15 to 5 per cent and re-pointed to the moment money moves from a mobile-money wallet into a betting account.^[25]

Athletes are a distinct population and the literature on them is small: a 2025 study of Swedish elite male footballers found 6.6 per cent problem gambling, a scoping review of college athletes gave a range of roughly 3 to 15 per cent, and a national United States sample gave 4.3 per cent. These are disorder estimates and should never be conflated with participation: a 2025 survey of 13,306 male college athletes found 21.5 per cent had placed at least one sports wager in the previous year, which is a different measurement of a different thing.^{[52] [53] [58]}