ANJ Finds Bettors It Flags as Excessive Place Up to 89% of Stakes on Half, Quarter and Set Bets

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 Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ) says online sports betting stakes rose 12.0% to €11,517m in 2025 and gross gaming revenue 10.4% to €1,766m, despite a calendar with no major tournament, in a note published on 12 October
• Football took 54.9% of stakes and supplied about half the growth in stakes and two thirds of the growth in revenue, with the Champions League going from 137 to 189 matches and its stakes rising 48.6%
• Operators set their payout rate close to the legal 85% ceiling; after a September in which bettors won, the market's monthly rate fell to 74.2% in November, which the ANJ says seems to reflect a year-end adjustment of odds
• Players classed as excessive or manifestly excessive by the ANJ's detection algorithm placed more than 80% of football stakes on the leagues of Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia, and 80% to 89% of stakes on bets settled on a half, quarter, set or game
• The ANJ says this could argue for building player protection into the rules on which competitions and bet types it authorises, but it announced no measure or timetable

More Matches, Not Just More Bettors, Drove France's 2025 Growth

The ANJ's 18-page note on online sports betting by sport in 2025 draws three main conclusions. First, operators' management of the payout rate (TRJ, taux de retour aux joueurs) weighs on revenue, so stakes, not gross gaming revenue (PBJ), are the right measure of demand. Second, growth has two engines: football, whose reported 10.2% rise understates a real rate the regulator puts at up to 19% once Euro 2024 (€438m of stakes) is stripped out, and tennis, up 16.0%, a pace similar to 2024. Third, a long tail of low-profile competitions takes 37% of football stakes, about €2.3bn across 93 competitions, is bet more heavily in-play, and runs around the clock.

The Champions League is the clearest case of supply creating demand, according to the note. Its new format took it from 137 to 189 matches in calendar 2025, up 38%, and its stakes rose 48.6% to €829m, ahead of Ligue 1 (€603m). The ANJ attributes three quarters of that growth to the extra matches, with stakes per match up about 8% to roughly €4.4m. The Europa League and Conference League, reformatted the same way, grew only slightly, while the new 63-match Club World Cup drew €3.9m a match in its first edition.

Football took €6,320m of stakes in all. Across the segment, 5.27 million active accounts (up 7.9%) belonged to 3.65 million unique players, and average annual stakes per bettor reached €3,159, against €2,512 in 2020, which the ANJ says may reflect more intensive play. In its April review of 2025, the regulator put total French gambling revenue at €14.1bn and online revenue at €2,617m, with sports betting about two thirds of it; it gave no operator shares of online sports betting in either document.

How Operators Steer the Payout Rate

The payout rate is capped at 85%, as an annual average for each operator, and operators sit close to it: the market rate was 84.67% in 2025, after 84.45% in 2024. In September 2025, results favourable to bettors pushed the monthly rate to 94.5% and the cumulative rate above the cap, at 85.9%. October and November followed at 82.3% and 74.2%, bringing the cumulative rate back to 84.6% by the end of November. The ANJ says the sequence seems to reflect a year-end adjustment of odds; each operator's position against the cap is checked separately.

Margins differ by sport: the implied payout rate was 83.4% on football and 86.7% on tennis, whose stakes rose 16.0% but revenue only 8.6%. Volleyball revenue jumped 47.2% as the operator margin rose from 12.3% to 14.8%. In each case, the ANJ says, the gap is a margin movement, not a change in how people bet.

Half of all stakes were placed live. The live share falls as a competition's profile rises, from 26% on the Champions League and 30% to 35% on the major leagues to 48% on secondary competitions and 50% to 58% on European second divisions and unlisted leagues. Financial incentives totalled €180m, 1.6% of stakes, 80% of it to retain existing customers, peaking in September 2025 at €20.5m of loyalty bonuses against a monthly average of €12m. The note does not break out combined bets, or parlays.

The Player Protection Finding

Using football stakes from the first half of 2026, the ANJ found that the more obscure a competition, the higher the share staked by players its algorithm classes as excessive or manifestly excessive. About 35% of 2026 World Cup stakes came from recreational players; on the leagues of Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia, excessive and manifestly excessive players placed more than 80%. On second-quarter 2026 stakes, bets on a half, quarter, set or game, which lend themselves to live betting, drew 80% to 89% of their stakes from those players and 5% to 11% from recreational ones. The regulator cautions that this does not mean those competitions are more addictive in themselves; they probably reflect recreational bettors' lack of interest.

The Offer Is the Lever the ANJ Actually Holds

The betting offer grows in two ways, the note says: organisers add matches, and new betting markets are opened from the list set by the ANJ's board. When that second route covers obscure competitions or period bets, it seems to benefit mainly excessive players. That is a regulator pointing at its own approval list, a more direct tool than an advertising code or a youth loss cap whose threshold was left to a decree. But the ANJ stops at "could argue for", with no consultation or date, which leaves the next move to the board under its new president, Pascal Chevremont.

Revenue Is Partly a Pricing Decision, and the Regulator Says So

By pointing readers to stakes, the ANJ concedes that revenue is partly an operator pricing choice. If its reading of the autumn is right, a capped market managed itself back under the cap, and bettors in late 2025 got leaner prices partly because September's bettors had won. That is lawful if each operator ends the year at or below 85%; the individual check the ANJ mentions has not been published.

The Long Tail, Not the World Cup, Is the Test

Big events bring pre-match money from the general public and dilute the share from heavy players. The 24-hour live offer on leagues few French bettors follow does the opposite, and it is where the regulator's own data now points.

France has published who bets on what. Whether the ANJ uses its control of the betting list to act on it is the question the note leaves open.