France: all our coverage

The former Française des Jeux began the year aiming for slight revenue growth and now expects a mid-single-digit decline, with its margin target trimmed to around 23%. Fewer big EuroMillions jackpots, high winnings for retail bettors and tax rises did most of the damage.

A survey of 5,000 French 15 to 17-year-olds funded by the Autorité Nationale des Jeux finds that teenagers who play both gambling-style video games and real-money games score far worse on problem gambling than those who only gamble. It shows an association and a sequence, not a cause, and its authors say so.

Kambi has signed the UK and Irish bookmaker to its full outsourced sportsbook at a time when partner migrations are shrinking its European business. The value, the term and the launch date are not disclosed, and QuinnBet's last platform move ended in a Gambling Commission finding.

France's regulated gambling market barely grew in the first half, and only because online sports betting had a World Cup June. The regulator now says the full-year figure depends on whether a record 5.85 million active online accounts keep playing after the tournament, and on a lottery operator whose French revenue is shrinking.

Spain's gambling regulator has put its common risk-detection model back out for comment until 22 October after a data protection review. Once in force, one model trained on clinically diagnosed players would decide who every licensed operator treats as at risk, in place of in-house systems that flag from 0% to 13.6% of accounts.

France's gambling regulator has broken its 2025 online sports betting figures down by sport and found growth built on more matches, a 24-hour live offer and operators steering payouts to the 85% cap. The sharper finding is who bets on the obscure end of the menu: mostly players its own algorithm flags as excessive.

France's gambling regulator and its advertising self-regulator have renewed the 2023 agreement under which the ARPP vets operators' ads before release and consults the ANJ when in doubt. The new version adds Web3 games, influencer certification and a review of the 2022 ad charters, but its text has not been published.

The Ministry of Culture and Equality has put online poker for the state monopoly out to a fast-track consultation, two years after Norsk Tipping asked for it. The proposal comes with tight stakes, loss and table limits, and an open question about whether a Norway-only player pool can compete with the foreign sites it is meant to replace.

TOTO, Holland Casino, Kansino, FairPlay, Bingoal, bet365, GG Poker and Betcity have licences to September 2031. For the first time the regulator explicitly examined violations definitively established in the previous five years, asked applicants what they had done about them, and issued unnamed operators "additional points for attention".

The regulator has reminded operators that they must screen customers against asset-freezing measures, block designated individuals from opening accounts or betting, freeze funds immediately and report to the Minister for the Economy. The case behind the warning brought a €20,000 fine, a suspended two-month operating ban, and personal penalties for two executives.

The exchange has been meeting regulators in the UK and the EU to argue that its contracts belong to financial supervisors rather than gambling ones, the Financial Times reports, after being blocked in Italy, the Netherlands and France. Britain's Gambling Commission says a prediction market launching here could not classify itself as non-gambling.

The Gaming Supervisory Authority opened an account, funded it and bet on sports results, then took the evidence to the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court. Internet providers must block the site and payment firms must stop dealing with Adventure One QSS. It is the first prediction market Lithuania has treated as an unlicensed bookmaker, and the 2,204th site it has blocked.

From 14 September every gambling advertiser must show a clean compliance record, manager accounts with repeated revocations are barred, and free subdomains and unrelated domains are ineligible. Croatia is cut off entirely from 7 October.

The EU securities regulator's risk report finds the biggest platforms hold no EU authorisation, that binary-option rules bar retail sale where contracts are derivatives, and that platform surveillance arrives only after the profits are banked.

The ANJ is looking at the front-of-shirt deal between the Ligue 1 club and a company that now runs its own event-contracts exchange, according to L'Equipe, the French sports daily. France blocked Polymarket in July, and the question this raises is whether a prediction-market operator can be a football sponsor in a country where it cannot take a bet.

Germany's Gauselmann group has agreed terms to take control of the Le Stelsia casino group and, with it, listed Société Française de Casinos. The price it has put on the listed shares says more about the deal than the headline value does.

European platform providers have spent a decade failing in francophone Africa. Christophe Casanova, the former derivatives trader who runs the French platform that did not, says they arrive with the wrong mental model, and concedes that the unlicensed operators his clients compete against hold advantages no product can answer.

France's state-controlled horseracing monopoly PMU has signed a technology agreement with BetMakers to extend its pool and fixed-odds betting services internationally, a deal that arrives as BetMakers completes its AU$267m acquisition by Tabcorp and builds out a growing roster of global operator partnerships.

A post-tournament review from B2B supplier DATA.BET offers one of the first detailed reads on how the first 48-team World Cup was actually bet: France drew the most interest, in-play held a steady share, and the knockout rounds outweighed a much larger group stage.

France's National Assembly has written a mandatory youth loss limit into its professional-sport bill, obliging the government to cap what young adults can lose on betting. The crucial threshold, however, will be set later by decree.

A presidential decree has installed Pascal Chevremont at the head of France's gambling regulator, closing a contested confirmation that cleared the National Assembly by a single vote. He inherits a mandate framed around the fight against the illegal market and the protection of vulnerable players.

Brussels has shared early estimates suggesting new EU-level taxes on online gambling, big tech and crypto could raise close to €11 billion a year for the 2028 to 2034 budget. A 3% levy on gambling net turnover could yield around €1.9 billion annually, though the figures are analytical options, not law, and any bloc-wide tax needs unanimous Member State approval.

Spain's gambling regulator, the DGOJ, has ordered a precautionary nationwide block on Polymarket and Kalshi and opened a sanctions procedure, treating the prediction platforms as unlicensed gambling rather than financial exchanges and aligning Spain with a widening European crackdown.

France's regulator has built a tool that lets operators measure whether their own player protection systems are actually working. The findings should worry the entire industry: excessive players may account for 60% of account-based gambling revenue.