When it comes time to take stock, the number of medals obtained by French athletes, TV audiences or crowds in the stadiums will not be the only indicators to validate the success of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (OG).
Records are expected in another discipline: sports betting. An unprecedented summer is ahead for the sixteen operators approved on the French market. Gambling has already reached a peak of 13 billion euros in 2023, to which must be added volumes at least as large, wagered by French players on foreign, illegal platforms. Added to this out-of-control tidal wave are tens of thousands of players connecting from France with a virtual private network (VPN), impossible to geolocate or quantify. These sites based in Asia or in tax havens also intend to participate in the party.
Tens of millions of bets will first flood into the Euro football tournament, which has just started and will run until July 14. “King sport” remains the queen discipline of sports betting, with nearly 70% of bets. During the last World Cup, in Qatar, in 2022, half a billion euros were bet in France.
In the process, Paris 2024 will be the scene of gambling like no other edition of the Games. Dozens of new competitions have been included in the list of sports eligible for betting. A few days ago, team basketball of three, climbing, taekwondo, and even mixed team archery joined the selection of 772 competitions and disciplines offered to already insatiable players. The euros bet during Paris 2024 should further double compared to the Tokyo Olympics, already twice as high as those in Rio.
All over the world, sport and gambling now have their destinies linked. In Europe, betting represents a market of more than 230 billion euros, according to Sportradar. In Asia, they will soon reach 1,000 billion dollars. Every year, countries that protected their national competitions authorize gambling, such as the United States in 2018, where stakes already amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, or more recently Brazil.
“In France, growth has been uninterrupted since legalization in 2010 and has benefited from the increase in the rate of smartphone equipment”, analyzes Corentin Segalen, head of sports activity within the National Games Authority (ANJ). Officially installed in May 2010 under the name of the Online Gaming Regulatory Authority, renamed ANJ in 2020, the regulator of the online games of chance market (poker, sports and horse racing) has since followed the inexorable explosion of betting .
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