Spain's gambling regulator has reopened one of Europe's most contested advertising fights, proposing to bar celebrities and influencers from all gambling promotion as it rewrites the 2011 Gambling Act, two years after the courts struck down its last attempt.
Spain's gambling regulator has reopened one of Europe's most contested advertising fights, proposing to bar celebrities and influencers from all gambling promotion as it rewrites the 2011 Gambling Act, two years after the courts struck down its last attempt.
Spain has revived its effort to remove celebrity and influencer endorsements from gambling advertising, launching a public consultation on a preliminary draft that would amend the country's 2011 Gambling Act. The Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego (DGOJ), the regulator that sits within the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, ran the consultation on the draft with a deadline for feedback of 22 June 2026.
The draft targets the promotional side of the market. Its central proposal would prohibit the use of celebrities and influencers across all gambling advertising. Alongside that, it would tighten promotional and bonus campaigns aimed at attracting new customers and would limit the organic search-engine listings through which gambling content reaches players. Together the measures represent one of the more expansive advertising crackdowns proposed in a major European market.
The initiative is Spain's second attempt at restrictions of this kind. An earlier advertising royal decree was struck down by the Supreme Court in April 2024, which found that the measure lacked sufficient legal basis. By routing the new restrictions through an amendment to the primary legislation, Law 13/2011, rather than through secondary rule-making alone, the government appears to be seeking the firmer statutory footing the courts previously found wanting.
DGOJ director general Mikel Arana has presented the reform as a modernisation of a law now 15 years old, intended to strengthen consumer protection and to give the regulator stronger tools against illegal gambling. Arana has previously flagged a monitoring system designed to track more than 60 behavioural and transactional variables in real time, part of a broader push to supervise the market more closely. The advertising proposals remain at consultation stage and have not been adopted as a decree.
A Legal-Basis Problem, Not a Policy One, Sank the Last Attempt
The decisive detail in this second attempt is procedural. When the Supreme Court struck down Spain's previous advertising restrictions in April 2024, it did so on the ground of insufficient legal basis, not because the policy of curbing gambling promotion was itself impermissible. That distinction shapes everything about the current draft. By amending Law 13/2011 directly, the government is trying to build the statutory foundation the court said was missing, which makes the reform harder to overturn on the same reasoning. It also raises the stakes of the consultation: the detail of how the ban on celebrity and influencer endorsements is drafted will determine whether it survives the inevitable legal challenge from an industry that has already won once.
Banning Endorsements in Law Is Easier Than Enforcing Them on Social Platforms
Even a well-drafted prohibition faces the enforcement gap that dogs advertising rules everywhere. A ban on celebrities and influencers is clear on paper, but influencer gambling promotion migrates readily across borders and platforms, into affiliate content, streaming and social media that a national regulator cannot police as easily as a television slot. Spain's parallel proposals to limit organic search listings and tighten new-customer bonus campaigns acknowledge that the promotional surface is now diffuse. The test will be whether the DGOJ's monitoring capability, including the real-time variable tracking Arana has described, can detect breaches at the speed and scale at which influencer content actually spreads. A rule that cannot be enforced on the platforms where the advertising lives protects players mostly in theory.
The Reform Weighs Consumer Protection Against a Marketable Licensed Market
Behind the advertising fight sits the familiar tension between harm reduction and a commercially viable licensed market. Endorsements and new-customer bonuses are among the most effective tools operators use to draw players toward regulated products, and constraining them narrows the gap between the licensed market and its unlicensed rivals. Spain is betting that stronger consumer protection and better tools against illegal gambling will, in combination, keep players inside the regulated perimeter even as promotion is curbed. That balance is credible only if the enforcement against illegal operators is as real as the restrictions on licensed ones. The consultation has closed. Whether Spain has learned the lesson of 2024 will show in the draft that emerges from it.
