Italian Republic
Italy is one of Europe's largest gambling markets and has just completed the most consequential restructuring of any of them. Legislative Decree No. 41/2024, effective from April 2024 and administered by the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli, replaced the previous concession system with a capped set of nine-year online concessions carrying a licence fee of EUR 7 million. In September 2025 the ADM awarded concessions to 46 operators. The design is deliberately consolidating. A seven-figure entry fee and a fixed number of nine-year concessions removes the long tail of small licensees that characterised the old system, and it prices the market for operators with scale and patience. Anyone not among the 46 is out of a market of Italy's size for the better part of a decade. Italy also operates one of Europe's strictest advertising regimes, having banned gambling advertising and sponsorship outright, so the competitive levers available to those 46 concession holders are product and price rather than marketing. That combination, a closed field and no advertising, produces a market that behaves very differently from an open licensed one. Share moves slowly, brand equity built before the ban is unusually valuable, and the concession itself is the asset. It is the European market where the licence is worth most and the marketing worth least.
Legislative Decree No. 41 of 25 March 2024 (Gaming Reorganisation Decree)
Online (remote) gambling concession
The reform's effect is consolidation: a smaller field of well-capitalised concession-holders paying a high entry fee. Watch how the EUR 7 million fee and per-vertical GGR taxes shape competition, and the parallel, slower reorganisation of the land-based sector.
A binding merger agreement signed in Rome and Barcelona creates the second-largest listed gaming and sports betting operator in the world, on about €2 billion of pro forma EBITDA. Cirsa is valued at roughly 6x.
Italy's customs and monopolies regulator has ordered internet providers to make Polymarket and hundreds of other sites unreachable, reasserting that a prediction market operating without an Italian concession is simply an unlicensed gambling operator. It is Polymarket's second Italian blackout in nine months.
Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli
Normattiva (translated)