From player protection to channelisation: Why Europe’s World Cup gambling warnings have changed
Every major football tournament brings a familiar set of anxieties. A decade ago, regulators approaching a World Cup or European Championship would typically focus their messaging on gambling-related harm, excessive advertising and the risk of vulnerable consumers being swept up in a month-long betting frenzy.
This summer, the tone sounds noticeably different.
Across Europe, regulators and industry bodies have spent much of the build-up to the FIFA World Cup warning consumers about illegal gambling operators. The French regulator, l’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), has highlighted the threat posed by prediction markets, illegal affiliates and influencers. The Dutch regulator, Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), has increased supervision of both legal and illegal advertising. In Britain, industry attention has focused heavily on black market activity and concerns that unlicensed operators will use the tournament as a recruitment opportunity.
At first glance, the shift appears striking. Has the gambling industry moved on from concerns about player protection within the regulated market? Have regulators concluded that illegal operators now pose a greater threat than licensed ones?
The answer, according to regulators and experts, is more nuanced. Far from replacing player protection, the growing focus on illegal gambling reflects a belief that consumer safeguards and channelisation have become inseparable.
In other words, regulators increasingly recognise that protections only work if consumers remain within the regulated system.
Significant implications
The clearest explanation comes from Ismail Vali, president of Gaming Compliance International (GCI), who argues that the industry’s understanding of risk has evolved.
“Player protection remains critically important, and that has not changed,” he says. “What has changed is the industry’s understanding of where many of the risks now exist.”
Historically, public debate concentrated on licensed operators because that was where regulators had visibility. Data existed, interventions could be measured and compliance obligations could be enforced. The regulated sector was therefore the most visible source of potential harm.
Today, however, regulators are paying increasing attention to what Vali calls the “systemic” threat posed by unlicensed operators.
“The regulated sector is the visible risk,” he says. “Illegal gambling is increasingly the structural risk to marketplace outcomes.”
Self-exclusion systems, affordability checks, responsible gambling tools and dispute-resolution mechanisms all rely on one fundamental condition: consumers must actually use regulated operators.
“A self-exclusion scheme only protects a consumer if that consumer does not immediately migrate to an illegal operator,” Vali notes.
The implication is significant. For years, gambling policy was largely concerned with regulating licensed businesses. Increasingly, regulators are asking a different question: not whether operators are complying with rules, but whether consumers are staying within the regulated market at all.
“The purpose of regulation is not to exclusively regulate regulated operators,” Vali argues. “The purpose of regulation is to regulate the marketplace.”
The Dutch balancing act
Few jurisdictions illustrate this evolution more clearly than the Netherlands.
The Dutch government recently unveiled plans to strengthen consumer protections, including tighter restrictions on gambling activity and advertising, while simultaneously seeking additional powers for KSA to combat illegal gambling.
To some observers, those objectives may appear contradictory. Tougher rules can make licensed products less attractive, potentially pushing consumers towards unregulated alternatives.
KSA sees the relationship differently.
“The illegal and legal market are communicating vessels,” the regulator says. “When strengthening player protections, it is likely some players will drift away from the legal to illegal offering. To contain this, it is necessary to battle the illegal market even harder and more effectively,” a KSA spokesperson tells iGB.
That logic increasingly underpins European regulatory thinking. Rather than viewing consumer protection and black market enforcement as competing priorities, regulators see them as complementary.
KSA remains adamant that “player protection is our number one priority”. Yet it also argues that “on the black market, player protection is far worse. Therefore, when strengthening player protections, we also need to battle the illegal market even harder.”
The World Cup has reinforced that concern. During previous tournaments, KSA observed a surge in sports betting activity and worries that younger adults could be drawn into gambling for the first time.
“Our main concern is that vulnerable groups, such as 18-24 year olds, will start betting during this period,” the regulator says.
Consequently, it has launched awareness campaigns while increasing supervision of advertising by both licensed and unlicensed operators.
Far from abandoning player protection, the Dutch approach suggests regulators increasingly regard channelisation as part of the consumer-protection toolkit itself.
The French strategy
The French regulator tells a similar story.
ANJ rejects the notion that concern about illegal gambling is a new development. France has long prioritised channelisation, maintaining a channelisation rate of around 85% through website-blocking and payment-blocking measures.
“We don’t see a specific emergence of black market concerns in France,” ANJ says in a written response to iGB. “The fight against the illegal offer has always been a priority since the beginning of gambling regulation in France.”
At the same time, ANJ insists that player protection remains central to its World Cup strategy.
The regulator has closely monitored marketing expenditure, engaged with operators and advertising professionals to limit promotional activity during the tournament and launched a dedicated responsible gambling campaign called “Zone à risques”.
“In France, our motto is that gambling must be recreational,” ANJ explains. “Consequently, legal operators are allowed to put forward an attractive offer, provided they ensure that players continue to treat gambling as a form of recreation.”
Yet ANJ also acknowledges that technological developments have altered the regulatory landscape.
“It is true that regulators are, at the same time, increasingly warning of the dangers of illegal gambling,” it says, pointing to “the use of affiliates by illegal operators and new types of games, such as prediction markets”.
These developments have made unlicensed gambling easier to access and harder to distinguish from regulated offerings.
As a result, ANJ argues that anti-black market efforts and player protection obligations must advance together. “The ANJ’s efforts to combat illegal gambling go hand in hand with the increased demands placed on legal operators to better fulfil their obligations to identify and support problem gamblers.”
Has player protection become business as usual?
For some industry observers, another factor helps explain the changing conversation: regulated operators have become substantially better at consumer protection.
Victoria Reed, chief executive of Better Change, believes the sector’s capabilities have advanced significantly compared with previous tournaments.
“This World Cup will see more focus on consumer safety than ever before due to the growing population of safer gambling professionals in the industry as well as advancement in player tracking technology,” she says.
“Player protection has become business as usual and there is less need for external groups to try to pressure or lobby the industry and the regulator into action.”
That does not mean the issue has disappeared. Rather, it has become embedded within the day-to-day operation of licensed gambling businesses.
“Player protection is more prominent than it ever has been before,” Reed argues. “There are thousands of people employed in the regulated industry focused on player safety 24 hours a day and seven days a week.”
The rise of the black market therefore reflects a different concern. Unlike regulated operators, illegal platforms generally offer no meaningful consumer safeguards.
“There is no age verification, no safer gambling interactions or controls, no self-exclusion scheme,” Reed says. “In fact, the illegal market targets those who have excluded from regulated sites.”
Viewed through that lens, the increased attention paid to illegal gambling is not a retreat from responsible gambling principles, but rather an extension of them.
British position more cautious
If regulators in France and the Netherlands are increasingly framing illegal gambling as a structural threat, the British position is more cautious.
The Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) has highlighted concerns that unlicensed operators could exploit the World Cup for customer acquisition. However, the UK regulator has avoided endorsing any suggestion of a sharp or sustained shift in consumer behaviour.
A Commission spokesperson says early signals remain broadly stable. “We won’t fully see any impact on trends until early July, but looking at the most recent data set, things have looked fairly stable in the lead up to the World Cup, and there is nothing that currently indicates any significantly differing patterns of consumer behaviour.”
The regulator is clear that both enforcement against illegal gambling and consumer protection within the licensed market remain priorities. “Both are important,” the spokesperson says, adding that additional funding for tackling illegal gambling is designed so it does not detract from wider oversight duties.
On policy design, the Commission says “we aim to be proportionate and consider the costs and benefits of our regulatory model”.
While acknowledging rising attention on illegal gambling, the Commission also challenges claims of rapid growth. Its data, it notes, “doesn’t currently support the often claimed view that engagement with the illegal market is experiencing sustained growth”.
For the Commission, the core challenge remains unchanged: maintaining a regulatory balance that keeps gambling “fair, safe and crime free”, while preventing illegal operators from scaling.
Illegal operators no longer rely on offshore websites
GCI’s research published this month suggests illegal gambling is becoming more sophisticated and more deeply embedded across digital ecosystems. The firm estimates that unregulated online gambling generated $5.9 trillion in wagering value globally during 2025. It also estimates that unregulated operators accounted for 78% of global online gambling gross gaming revenue, although such figures remain contested within the industry and depend on methodology.
But more revealing than the headline numbers is the mechanism behind them.
Illegal operators no longer rely solely on obscure offshore websites. They acquire customers through search engines, affiliates, messaging platforms, social media, streaming services, mobile applications and increasingly sophisticated digital marketing channels.
Vali argues that these developments have fundamentally changed the nature of gambling regulation.
“Today, illegal operators can acquire, target and retain customers through search, social media, affiliates, messaging platforms, streaming services, AI-driven marketing and crypto-enabled ecosystems that simply did not exist at the same scale a decade ago.”
That reality helps explain why regulators increasingly speak about ecosystems rather than operators.
The contest is no longer merely between licensed firms and their regulators. It is between regulated and unregulated pathways competing for the same customers across the same digital landscape.
The next phase of gambling regulation
The World Cup may ultimately be remembered not for a surge in illegal gambling but for revealing how regulatory thinking has evolved.
Five years ago, policymakers primarily asked whether licensed operators were doing enough to protect consumers.
Today, they are asking an additional question: can consumer protection succeed if consumers leave the regulated market altogether?
The answers emerging from France, the Netherlands and Britain suggest that player protection remains every bit as important as before. What has changed is the recognition that channelisation and consumer protection are increasingly intertwined.
The future challenge for regulators will therefore be broader than writing new rules or imposing additional safeguards. It will be determining whether those interventions actually produce better marketplace outcomes.
As Vali puts it, success should not be measured by “how effectively we regulate licensed operators in isolation”. Instead, he says, it should be measured by whether “the marketplace itself is becoming safer, more accountable and more channelised into the regulated sector over time”.
For Europe’s regulators, that may prove the defining gambling policy question of the next decade.