SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Continuing on with the recap of some of the biggest events in gambling in 2024, we now turn eyes to the final months of the year to review the headlines that caught our attention from October through to December.
It was expected that the big players in the industry would utilise the last stretch of the year to provide a clearer picture of their commercial ambitions going forward, and they did not disappoint.
In October, Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) emerged on Stockholm’s Nasdaq trading exchange as an independent iGaming technology group under the name ‘GiG Software Plc’, officially finalising the two-year split process from its media branch.
The firm is now solely a B2B technology supplier, managing the iGaming platform CoreX, its sportsbook SportX, and its latest North America-facing casino sweepstakes offering SweepX.
Another development that couldn’t go unnoticed was the shareholder backing that Everi Holdings received to be acquired by private equity fund Apollo Global Management for a total of $6.3bn.
Apollo swooped in at the last second of a planned merger between Everi and a substantial part of International Game Technology PLC (IGT), which the latter initiated to create a standalone lottery business under the IGT brand.
Staying on gambling conglomerate frequency, Entain Plc welcomed Stella David as Board Chair in October. She stepped in to fill the shoes of Barry Gibson, who took the decision to depart from all Entain-related corporate duties.
This was not David’s first time to come to the rescue, having previously served as Entain’s Interim CEO after Jette Nygaard-Andersen handed in her resignation late last year.
We would hear again from the FTSE 100 gambling group in November when it announced a key hire in the face of Dafne Guisard as the new Chief Operations Officer.
Joining the team under the group’s CEO Gavin Isaacs, Guisard will leverage her corporate finance and strategic planning expertise to lead the company into its next chapter of digital transformation, customer-centric reorganisation, and M&A integration.
Speaking of new beginnings, the United Arab Emirates officially kickstarted gambling by granting Wynn Resorts the first commercial gaming operator license in the country a little over a year after the establishment of the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority (GCGRA).
The granting of the license was a point of discussion even prior to the announcement due to the high-end hotel and casino operator developing an integrated resort in the city of Ras Al-Khaimah long before the formation of the GCGRA.
Contrary to the regulatory swiftness of the UAE, Brazil decided that it needs more time to cast a vote on its land-based gambling decree, postponing the decision until next year in order to bring the quality of the texts on par with that of its online gambling framework. A similar fate followed planned amendments to the gambling act of neighbouring Paraguay.
Swapping the sunscreen for a scarf, we move over to Scandinavia and more particularly Finland, where the local government decided to strip down the national operator Veikkaus of its monopoly over betting on horseracing – allowing commercial players to compete in the vertical as part of Finland’s wider strategy to liberalise its online gambling sector by 2026.
Fellow Nordic state Sweden also had reasons to celebrate at the end of 2024, with the country officially joining the Council of Europe’s Macolin Convention – the only international legal framework against match-fixing in sports.
As a matter of fact, responsible gambling as a whole was celebrated all across Europe in the final countdown to 2025, with this year’s edition of the Safer Gambling Week yielding record-breaking results, according to the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA).
A 20% YoY increase in participation showcased the growing commitment of Europe’s gambling sector towards the promotion of safer gambling practices and responsible play.
And last but not least, France once again proved that it is one of Europe’s best when it comes to creating political conundrums – and this time gambling was under the guillotine.
French stakeholders were thrown into panic mode when in October local press broke the news that Prime Minister Michel Barnier is planning to reduce national debt and raise an additional €500m for the country’s coffers by introducing higher taxes for the gambling sector – which were already high to begin with.
The rumour then quickly spread, prompting a swift response from the French gambling sector, and in particular those representing online operators, as online sportsbooks were expected to be hit the hardest from the tax increases.
All of this happened parallel to ongoing debates on regulating online casino in France, which itself led to some internal friction within the sector.
Regardless, all’s well that ends well. After countless hours of constructive dialogue between French policymakers and gambling leaders, hands were shaken in November on a six-month consultation period to determine whether regulation is needed, and if so – how should it be implemented when it potentially arrives in 2026 at the earliest.
