Spain: all our coverage

Launched together with the MOVE Foundation and powered by BETBY, the MOVE Cup will bring eight of the world's top grandmasters to Barcelona from 18 to 20 January 2027, during ICE Barcelona week. Its €300,000 prize fund will be matched by the same amount for charity.

Brightstar Lottery has renewed the technology contract behind the lottery of Spain's national organisation of the blind, a relationship that dates back to 2002. The release calls it multi-year and stops there: no end date, no value, and a scope limited to software and the central system.

Peru's tourism and trade ministry has published draft amendments to the regulations behind its licensed online gambling market, with 15 days for comment. It would spell out detailed advertising rules, but also cut the maximum fine for the most serious breaches from 200 to 70 tax units.

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.

Spain's consumer affairs ministry has switched on a regulator-run system that will add up each player's deposits across all licensed online operators and stop them at €700 a day, €1,750 a week and €3,300 over four weeks, plus a portal that shows players their whole market footprint. The limit binds from March 2027, and players can lift it themselves after three working days.

Rank's casinos are still growing, and their fastest-growing line is gaming machines, the product a Budget in 13 days may tax at twice the rate. Its bingo clubs stood still for the quarter, it closed three casinos, and its profit guidance now assumes the tax regime stays as it is.

A royal decree amending Spain's anti-money laundering regulation now requires licensed online operators to check that whoever holds the payment method used to deposit and withdraw is the person who holds the gambling account. Existing players get six months to comply and, on the decree's wording, cannot withdraw winnings in the meantime.

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.

The boards have signed the common merger plan that fixes the terms first announced in September: 0.668 Lottomatica shares per CIRSA share, a €262m CIRSA dividend before completion and a €744m capital return after it. With Blackstone committed, the votes are close to a formality. The regulators are not.

Denmark's government has put its lapsed gambling advertising bill back before the Folketing, with a 10-minute buffer around every live sports broadcast and new limits on who may appear in gambling ads. The clause with the most commercial bite is quieter: affiliates could no longer be paid on players' turnover or losses.

Pedro Sánchez's dissolution of the Cortes kills the only gambling-related measure that was actually before parliament, a ban on minors buying loot boxes. The Gambling Act reform never got that far, and the rules that matter most to operators were made by decree, where the election cannot reach them.

Spain's audiovisual regulator has ruled that an advert for a sports results app counted as gambling advertising because a "1 X 2 Apuestas" button appeared on screen, and that it was shown outside the 01:00 to 05:00 window the law allows. The broadcasts were in July 2024; the decision came 26 months later.

The London-listed events group is paying 11.1 times Clarion's expected 2027 EBITDA, part-funded by a £940 million share placing. The gambling industry's largest trade show is about to pass from private equity to a listed owner that names gaming as a growth category.

Polymarket has confirmed it is challenging the Dutch gambling regulator's order in court, after being charged for blocking Dutch users a day late. Its case is that event contracts belong with the financial markets supervisor, an argument that, if it won, could land it under the Netherlands' indefinite ban on selling binary options to retail clients.

Both houses of Parliament have unanimously approved an order that removes the offence of running remote gambling from Trinidad and Tobago. The licensing regime it depends on has sat unproclaimed since 2021, and the Attorney General has now promised it by New Year's Day.

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.

A contract from the Casino Secrets leak shows the racing pictures and data supplier agreed in 2022 to serve Santeda's brands for a share of their revenue, according to the Guardian. Its owners include bookmakers that have repeatedly warned about the illegal market, and Entain says it has raised its concerns with SIS.

The DGOJ's second-quarter data takes Spain's online market to about €993 million of gross gaming revenue in the first half, roughly 23% up on 2025. New accounts rose by half and operators spent €194 million on marketing, two years after the courts reopened welcome bonuses.

A working document submitted to the national regulator and the Gambling Policy Council on 7 September says Madrid's attempt to "coordinate" the protection of vulnerable players in land-based gambling is an attempt to direct powers the constitution gave the regions. Madrid's Ramón Cubián: "The autonomous communities are the authorities dealing with these matters every day."

Group gaming revenue up 5.8% to €352.5 million, adjusted EBITDA up 14.1%, and the online arm's best quarter yet on World Cup stakes 180% above 2022. What the market wants is not the numbers but the answer to a strategic review that has been running since the first quarter, with Jefferies and Macquarie engaged.

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.

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.

Parliament cleared the package on 19 August. Wagering ads disappear from live sport, from stadiums and from players' shirts, athletes and influencers can no longer promote betting, and a single national register will let Australians switch the advertising off everywhere at once. It commences on 1 January 2027.

The headline total barely moved on June. Underneath it, Kalshi added roughly a fifth to its volume while Polymarket's international book fell 26%, and the World Cup that drove the quarter ended on 19 July. August is the first clean read.