The analytical company Gaming Compliance International (GCI) has released a report for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFG) regarding the online gambling market across 27 EU countries for 2024-2025. The analysis focuses solely on online sports betting and online casinos, including poker and crypto-gambling.
GCI defines unlicensed operators as those without a local license, targeting residents of the country and accepting deposits and bets from them. Each mirror site is counted as a separate operator. Based on its own monitoring and third-party databases, GCI compared betting sites and apps separately for each EU country. The sample size used by GCI has not been disclosed. Here are the key findings highlighted by iGN:
Market Volume and Share in 2025:
€128 billion — total GGR of the online market (12% YoY)
€91.6 billion — GGR of the unlicensed segment (13.6% YoY, 74% compared to 2023)
72% — share of the unlicensed segment (1 percentage point YoY)
€36.5 billion — GGR of the licensed segment (8.6% YoY)
28% — share of the licensed segment (1 percentage point YoY)
75% vs 59% — share of online casinos in GGR of unlicensed and licensed segments
€22 billion — estimated tax losses on GGR
Regional Share and GGR of the Unlicensed Segment in 2025:
81% — Eastern Europe (€30.7 billion, 1 percentage point YoY)
74% — Western Europe (€36.9 billion, 2 percentage points YoY)
60% — Southern Europe (€17.1 billion, 2 percentage points YoY)
58% — Northern Europe (€6.9 billion, 3 percentage points YoY)
Audience in 2025:
121 million — number of Europeans who saw gambling content online
88 million — of them saw content from unlicensed operators
91% — share of materials promoting unlicensed operators in the gambling content seen by users who reacted to it (1 percentage point YoY)
Operators and Acquisition Channels:
6,238 — number of unlicensed operators (0.3% YoY)
17,501 — number of affiliates promoting unlicensed operators (15.2% YoY)
19% — share of global outgoing traffic from the streaming platform Kick directed to the crypto-casino Stake during peak periods of the 2026 FIFA World Cup (according to SimilarWeb)
26 out of 27 — number of countries where GCI found affiliate advertising for unlicensed operators on Kick
1 out of 6 — number of countries where the officially closed category of slots on Kick was indeed inaccessible to local users (Greece)
95% — share of views of pirated broadcasts of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Europe featuring ads from unlicensed operators (a total of 17.8 billion views lasting over 90 seconds)
85% — average moderation pass rate promised to gambling operators by intermediaries selling cloaking ads (more than half of those analyzed are based in the EU)
Licensing: EU vs. Transnational Jurisdictions (Anjouan, Curacao, Isle of Man, Malta):
€1.1 million vs €33,000 — average initial fee for a license covering multiple verticals
24% vs 2.3% — average tax on GGR
According to GCI's conclusions, the unlicensed segment relies not on individual sites but on a broader infrastructure of social networks, affiliates, payment services, advertising, streaming, search, and applications. Current measures by individual countries to control the market across Europe are insufficient. Derek Webb, founder of CFG, believes that the solution does not lie in tax and regulatory concessions for licensed operators but in coordinated enforcement among countries.
In 2025, the growth rate of GGR from the unlicensed segment decreased nearly fourfold compared to 53.2% the previous year, yet it remained higher than that of licensed operators. The GGR of unlicensed operators grew fastest in the southern (22.1%) and northern (21.1%) regions, while it grew slowest in the eastern (5.9%), where their share is the highest.