The third section of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court has refused to suspend the entry into force of article 23.1b of the Royal Decree on Advertising, which prohibits the dissemination of gambling advertising online, except for in specific circumstances.
The law would allow for gambling advertising to continue on websites or applications whose main activity is providing information on sporting events, provided they have mechanisms to prevent the access of minors and regularly include safer gambling messages.
AMI filed an appeal in January, requesting that the introduction of the law be delayed by four months as a precautionary measure.
The Supreme Court has rejected that the delay would be a convincing precautionary protection measure, and stated that any damages that may be caused by the introduction of the law would not be irreversible.
The Court said that in fact what was being questioned by the appeal was the very validity of the provision, based on economic criteria and the claim that the restrictions would cause damages amounting to almost €6m for the association.
As the State Attorney argued in his opposition brief, the Court said, this argument does not take into account that the restrictions are general provisions of mandatory compliance for all affected, and the validity of the laws cannot be questioned based on interests other than the public interest.
The Court argued that the Royal Decree set out clearly the reasons of public interest that justify the restrictions, with a focus on the protection of customers including the most vulnerable.
The law is intended to avoid creating addiction to non-responsible gambling activity, it said, which requires a more rigorous control of gambling advertising.
Spanish operators’ association Jdigital also filed an appeal with the court in January, focused on the “disproportionality” of the restrictions which it said would “leave gambling consumers defenceless and unprotected”. The result of Jdigital’s appeal has not yet been published.
The country’s Ministry for Consumer Affairs said in January that consumer protection would be a key focus in 2021, as it aimed to introduce new measures for action, intervention, control, prevention, awareness raising and player safeguarding.
Under the deal, Entain, previously known as GVC Holdings, will continue to have access to Scientific Games’ OpenGaming ecosystem.
Entain brands such as Ladbrokes, Coral, bwin, PartyCasino and Gala will be able to use the content aggregation platform to access more than 3,000 igaming titles from a range of studios, as well as responsible gambling tools.
The agreement covers Entain’s activities in the UK, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
“Over a number of years, OpenGaming has been a key component of our online gaming offer, helping to establish it as the world’s biggest and best casino portfolio,” Entain chief product officer Valery Gelfman said.
“Extending our partnership with Scientific Games will enable us to continue to build our market share in regulated markets in Europe and beyond.”
Scientific Games’ senior vice president of gaming for digital, Dylan Slaney, added: “We have an extensive roadmap of exciting new titles that Entain brands will receive over the coming months through our content aggregation platform.
“With the robust regulatory tools that are embedded within OpenGaming, we’re in the perfect position to provide valuable support for Entain as the group grows its reach within regulated markets.”
The extension comes after Entain last week reported that its revenue in 2020 was almost exactly flat at £3.63bn, as online growth largely cancelled out retail declines.
Casino and slots market share leader PokerStars was the principal operator beneficiary of the vertical’s explosive growth in the past two months, collecting 11% or close to €18m of this total in January (see Chart 7).
This pushed total online GGR for the dot.it market across all products to €335.9m, only bettered by the December 2020 total (Chart 1).
In a month where betting shops remained shuttered under Covid-19 restrictions, January 2021 saw dot.it sports betting operators generated the second highest ever monthly total of €143.64m (Chart 6).
Bet365, having tumbled from first to sixth in the online betting rankings in November and December as competitors with land-based shops migrated bettors online, rebounded in January, increasing its market share by two percentage points to 12.2% over the month (Chart 8).
This was sufficient to move it back to third position behind Sisal and Snai, with respective 12.8% and 12.4% market shares.
Online poker continued its rebound under lockdown, albeit at a slower rate than in November and December, tournament revenues 6% from €12.2m to €12.96m and cash by 6.5% from €8.3m to €8.84m. PokerStars 52.9% and 43.5% of tournaments and ring games in January.
Scroll down for the infographic to track market and product growth since 2016, as well as operator shares across casino, betting and poker since 2017.
In his new role, Hellberg will spearhead PlayStar’s US expansion plans, with the brand due to launch in New Jersey before the end of the year and additional state roll-outs planned for next year.
Hellberg led Catena Media as chief executive from March 2018 to January this year, when he was replaced by Göran Blomberg.
Prior to this, he served as CEO and chairman of Readly, taking the business from start-up and putting it on the path to being listed on the NASDAQ Stockholm.
Hellberg also had a spell as CEO of Nordic Gaming Group (NordicBet), which was later acquired by Betsson Group.
“In PlayStar I see a challenger brand that has what it takes, both in terms of product and management team, to become a major player in the US market as it continues to roll out,” Hellberg said.
If one looked solely at the industry news related to appointments this year, they might come to the conclusion that the gaming industry is an industry with reasonable gender diversity.
Within the space of one week in late January, there were three female CEO appointments, including the first ever female CEO of a listed British gaming company in Entain’s Jette Nygaard-Andersen.
This was followed by a spate of female board appointments. First, in mid-February, Bragg Gaming Group announced the appointment of Lara Falzon, former chief financial officer of Red Tiger Gaming and operational CFO of NetEnt to its board.
Then later in the month Entain announced that Stella David and Vicky Jarman would join its board, while Flutter named Holly Koeppel and Nancy Dubuc non-executive directors.
Flutter Entertainment chair Gary McGann specifically referenced gender diversity when making the announcement, and earlier in the month the gambling giant had also appointed its first director of inclusion and diversity.
The board appointments seem especially significant given this is an area where there is some evidence to suggest the industry had previously been going in the wrong direction. The All-in Diversity Project’s recently published All-Index 2019 found that just 22.5% of non-executive board members were female, down 5.5% on the previous year.
‘A shift in mentality’
The real question now is whether or not the string of female hires this year means that gaming companies are finally taking gender diversity seriously, something many have accused them of not doing in the past.
Falzon, who was also one of iGB’s Most Influential Women 2020, says she has noted improvements since moving into the industry in 2013. “I believe there has been a shift in mentality over the years and time has proven that women have the same abilities as their counterparts to occupy headship positions including at the board level.
“This augurs well for the future of women in this industry and I hope I can serve as an example and source of inspiration to other women to never look down, never give up and pursue these opportunities.”
However, Richard Schuetz, gaming and regulatory consultant and long-time advocate for greater equality in the industry, is sceptical about the industry’s progress.
“I believe that the gaming companies are becoming more alive to the outcry for the blatant sexism they have demonstrated for so long, and rather than leading the charge at fixing this, they are being dragged along. This means some rays of light, but still a painfully slow process.”
He adds that the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) has proven a setback. “I also believe that one of the unfortunate results of the pandemic will be that women have paid a higher price in a number of ways, and this includes opportunities for both employment and advancement.”
This view is shared by Christina Thakor-Rankin, co-founder of the All-in Diversity Project. “The last 12 months have been challenging for everyone, but especially so for working women juggling the challenges of lockdown, many having to prioritise caring over career.
“Combine enforced career breaks with lay-offs and those who have chosen to ‘pivot’ and take a new path post-pandemic and the numbers of women dropping out of the workplace are alarmingly high.”
The pandemic fall-out
There’s a significant amount of research to back up these observations. Various surveys and studies over the past year have shown that women have been more negatively impacted by the pandemic than men.
In January the UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) conducted a wide-ranging survey of more than 50,000 people (93% women). It found that the burden of juggling work, childcare and home schooling was falling primarily on women.
Its headline findings were worrying, with 90% of mothers saying their mental health had been negatively impacted and 25% worried they would lose their job. It also found that seven in 10 requests for furlough from working mothers had been turned down.
The problem is by no means restricted to the UK. This month PwC released its annual Women in Work report and warned that jobs losses since the pandemic hit had been higher for women than men across the OECD.
It highlighted an existing “unequal burden of unpaid care work that women undertake across the world”, and said this had increased even further due to Covid-19, reducing women’s participation in the workforce.
“Covid-19 threatens to reverse the important gains that have been made over the last decade, as the damage from the pandemic and unintended fallout from government response and recovery policies is disproportionately being felt by women,” said the report.
This is a valid point given those gains were underwhelming, at best. PwC’s index reported pre-pandemic 2019 figures and while these showed that things had been heading in the right direction, this was happening only very slowly.
Since PwC began compiling the index nine years ago, the proportion of working age women in the workforce had increased only from 66% in 2011 to 70% in 2019. The gender pay gap had barely moved, falling just one percentage point to 15% over the period. The percentage of women who were unemployed had fallen to 6% from 8%, although for men this fell to 5% from 8% over the same period.
lara falzon
As Falzon points out: “In Europe statistics show that we are around 60 years away from achieving full gender equality in our society if current developments remain constant. To me this answers automatically the question on whether more improvement is needed.”
A wider problem
Clearly, the problem is not specific to the gambling industry. But igaming companies in particular do have an opportunity to set themselves apart by taking some positive learnings from the pandemic. As was discussed in the people part of our annual predictions feature earlier this year, the move towards remote working has been pronounced in the industry and experts predict it’s a trend that’s here to stay.
This could pave the way for workplace flexibility to become the norm even beyond the pandemic, helping parents divide childcare responsibilities more equally and therefore helping women access the same opportunities as men.
Of course, much more is needed than simply allowing more flexible working. “I believe the focus should be primarily on education and providing women with the right knowledge and skills, irrespective of the industry,” says Falzon.
Initiatives such as William Hill’s recently announced Lead IT Lady are a definite step in the right direction. The Poland-based programme aims to improve leadership opportunities for women in technology, an area of business where gender balance has long been particularly poor across many industries, not just gaming.
Schuetz argues more data is also needed. “It is hard to manage something that you cannot measure, and a great improvement would be for every firm to annually publish their diversity statistics by job class, and pay differentials by gender and job class. Then it just won’t be more talk, but we can measure the reality of each firm,” he says.
There are some initiatives in this space that apply to larger gambling companies, such as mandatory gender pay gap reporting for companies with more than 50 employees in France and more than 250 employees in the UK, as well as industry-specific surveys such as the All-Index. But there’s still much more to be done if we are to get a comprehensive overview of the entire global industry.
There’s also a need to obtain buy-in from all levels on the need for gender diversity, and this includes men, says Falzon. “The role of men in society is also important in that they not only share responsibilities with women but also in recognising and acknowledging that women can be an asset to any organisation. Adding to this is also a matter of breaking stereotypes and avoid trying to associate roles to a particular gender.”
International Women’s Day is a good opportunity to raise awareness of the issues and it’s encouraging that so many companies in the industry are actively promoting it, but it’s only a small piece of the puzzle.
“If we are to have any chance of addressing the issues we need to act now, but it is not going to happen if we only talk about it for just one day of the year. We need a continuous conversation where we view every day as if it were an International Women’s Day,” concludes Thakor-Rankin.
The poll surveyed 1,683 British adults, and also found that 59% agreed with the statement that if too many limits are placed on people’s gambling behaviour, more will shift to the unlicensed black market. Only 10% of respondents disagreed with this statement.
The BGC pointed to a report published by PwC last month, which claimed that the number of British customers using black market sites to place bets had increased from 210,000 to 460,000 in the past two years.
The amount staked through unlicensed operators had doubled from £1.4bn to £2.8bn over this period, it said.
The poll was commissioned as the Gambling Commission continues its affordability and player interaction consultation ahead of the Government’s wider Gambling Review. The consultation on interaction included a proposed “soft cap” of £100 a month on gambling losses.
Critics have said that setting affordability limits could reduce the money horseracing receives from the betting levy by over £60m, the BGC pointed out.
In addition to the poll, the BGC has also commissioned a series of focus groups across the country, mostly drawing respondents from “Red Wall” constituencies that had recently swung from Labour to Conservative in the 2019 general election.
The BGC said that the groups showed that betting was a “normal social and leisure pastime for millions” and that voters were concerned about the state exercising too much control.
“My view is that limits are good, which is why people betting are now strongly encouraged to set their own limits on how much they spend. Affordability checks are also a good thing,” said Michael Dugher, chief executive of the BGC.
“But technology enables betting companies to see where customers are starting to display what we call ‘markers of harm’. In this way, potential problem gamblers and others who may be more at risk could be subject to enhanced affordability checks.”
Dugher also pointed to the horseracing industry’s reliance on money received from the betting levy, and said he hoped politicians would heed the findings and listen to voters in marginal seats, “who are wary of being told by Westminster how to live their lives, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
In January, British cross-sector organisation Gambling Business Group described the Gambling Commission’s proposed affordability checks as “prohibition by another name”, warning that they could lead to an increase in players accessing unlicensed operator websites.
A spokesperson for the operator, which offers a “football stock market” where futures in football players can be bought and sold, told iGB it wasn’t behind or in need of restructuring payments owed to affiliates or suppliers.
However, the spokesperson did not directly answer a question as to whether the brand was at risk of closing in the near future.
The BetIndex-owned operator temporarily cut maximum dividends – bonuses issued following achievements such as a goal – were cut by 78.6% to £0.03.
“In consultation with our legal and financial advisors we have had to make the very difficult decision that in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform we simply must reduce dividends,” Football Index said.
“This decision is not one that we have taken lightly. The board deliberated at length, and we have taken a number of other steps before reaching this decision: we have restructured, reduced costs, including taking directors’ salary cuts and have tried our very best to keep the dividends at the level that they have been.
“Unfortunately, however, the current yields are just not sustainable.”
In a follow-up statement, it explained that the business had been losing significant amounts of money lately. Initial recovery plans, that would have involved a less drastic dividend reduction, proved insufficient.
“Over recent months, Football Index has sustained substantial losses,” it explained. “The board agreed a recovery plan aimed at stemming these losses while retaining the dividend payments at current levels.
“It was hoped that this would stimulate a market recovery which would allow for the higher dividend to continue to be paid prior to the normal annual review, and for an exciting and affordable dividend to be announced at that time.”
It said that while its team worked hard to deliver based on that plan, it became clear that the higher dividends would still have proved unsustainable.
During this time, it offered markets on new players, through so-called initial public offerings. This, it said, was part of its effort to restimulate betting activity.
“The issuance of new shares and IPOs were key deliverables of that recovery plan, amongst other initiatives to rejuvenate the market,” it added.
The move led to a significant decrease in liquidity on the platform. However, a spokesperson told iGB that the move was the best available option for its long-term outlook even despite this impact.
“Every decision that we make with regards to changes to the platform is made with the express goal of providing a sustainable level of growth in terms of customers and the value of bets made in that period, and this was no exception,” the spokesperson said.
They added that Football Index was taking urgent action to keep an acceptable level of liquidity on the platform.
“We are working hard to restore consumer confidence in the platform as a matter of urgency.”
The spokesperson also told iGB that despite the need to restructure dividends to protect its long-term sustainability, that it was not behind or in need of restructuring any payments to affiliates or suppliers.
Football Index account funds are held in a standalone trading account separate from BetIndex’s general accounts. Trust arrangements are in place to offer protection of these funds but the operator said there is “no guarantee that all funds will be repaid in the event of insolvency”.
However, the operator’s terms and conditions say that the value of player shares purchased are “not stored in any account or otherwise protected as they are sums at risk”.
In December 2020, the operator’s co-founder Adam Cole announced he would leave the business at the end of the year as part of a “reset”.
BetIndex holds licences from the Great Britain Gambling Commission and the Jersey Gambling Commission.
Revenue for February amounted to $7.7m (£5.6m/€6.5m), up from $755,334 in the same month in 2020, but 31.8% lower than the record $11.3m posted in January of this year.
Online sports betting accounted for $6.0m in total revenue for the month, while retail reached $1.7m.
In terms of handle, consumers in Iowa wagered $143.6m on sports, up 152.4% from $56.9m, but slightly down from a record $149.5m in January.
Some $125.2m was wagered across online platforms in February, compared to $18.4m at retail sportsbooks facilities in the state.
Players won a total of $135.9m from sports betting in the month, while operators paid $520,444 in sports wagering tax.
The Bill, which was introduced by Rep Jeff Weninger in early February, was approved by the House Committee of the Whole yesterday (March 4), allowing it to pass onto its third reading. It passed its second reading on February 4.
It made further progress in late February, as it was approved by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic caucuses, after being passed by the House Commerce Committee by a 9-1 margin.
HB 2772 would allow consumers in the state to bet sports, at tribal casinos, at venues owned by major league sports teams and online.
In addition, the bill would add limited Keno games at off-track betting locations and social clubs and allow for paid fantasy sports.
Introduced in January and sponsored by the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee, Senate Bill 84, which seeks to expand the state’s Lottery Act, cleared the Senate by a vote of 26-12.
SB84 would allow the state’s four land-based casinos to open retail sportsbooks, as well as partner with up to three mobile sportsbooks.
Sports facilities in Kansas, including the Kansas Speedway motor-racing facility, would also be able to link up with casinos to launch online sports betting.
The bill also included provisions for tribal gambling, whereby recognised tribes in Kansas would be able to renegotiate gaming pacts with the state in order to legally offer sports wagering at their licensed casinos.
