ABSTRACT

Legal sports gambling in Spain was largely limited to people betting on the outcome of professional football matches through the football pools. Just over 10 years ago, even there was no specific regulation for sports gambling, several bookmakers were awarded the first licenses to operate sports betting in some Spanish regions. In 2011 the Spanish government began moving towards the regulation and legalisation of sports gambling in all its forms (football pools, fixed-odds sports betting, sports betting exchanges, etc.) both offline and through the Internet. This chapter provides an economic insight into the evolution and current status of the Spanish sports gambling industry, which size of the market in 2018 was estimated at more than €9,300 million in sales revenue (about 39% of the whole gambling industry in Spain).