HASWhen the sports budget is threatened by severe cuts, a crucial question arises: how to sustainably finance sports policy, particularly after the momentum generated by the Olympic and Paralympic Games? One avenue of financing deserves serious study in the framework of the next finance bill: what if sports betting, which generates enormous profits, contributed more to supporting the sport itself, instead of lining the pockets of just the houses? betting?
The summer of 2024 will have been of exceptional sporting density: between the 2024 European Football Championship and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, we have been copiously served with strong and collective emotions. This is where the beauty of sport lies: producing moments of popular fervor that bring people together and create common ground across the divisions of our societies.
Unfortunately, it is clear that online sports betting operators shamelessly exploit these emotions. Since market liberalization in 2010, they have competed in advertising ingenuity, promising to make us “live the strongest sport”that “The most important thing is to win” money, even going so far as to imply that gambling can contribute to social success.
An increasingly captivating clientele
If the National Gaming Authority (ANJ), in charge of regulating the sector year after year, recently attempted to clean up some of the most embarrassing slogans (in particular the infamous “Everything for the lady”), it is clear that this does not stop the increase in bets, which continue to grow exponentially.
In football alone, the increases amounted, according to the ANJ, to 135 million euros during Euro 2016, to 332 million euros for the 2018 World Cup, to 425 million euros on the occasion of Euro 2020, which celebrated in 2021, and, finally, to 597 million during the last World Cup, in 2022. And, as expected, 2024 will be a record year, with already 650 million euros of bets on the Euro Cup and 365 million on the Olympic Games , or more than one billion euros in these two events.
The operators have understood this well and are flooding the public space, our screens and even the athletes’ clothing, when they have not directly created their own media to keep an increasingly captive clientele on their networks, but also to introduce new players in the market. addiction spiral.
The illusion of the big prize, however, has devastating effects on the players’ health. Whether it is over-indebtedness, risk of job loss, psychological and physical consequences such as depression, isolation or risk of suicide, we are sometimes told that this only affects a minority of players with too much practice. But it is precisely these players who are driving the growth of the sector and lining the pockets of operators.
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