ANJ data show French bettors chasing niche leagues and live markets
France's gambling regulator reports strong growth in licensed sports betting for 2025, but says high-risk players are disproportionately drawn to obscure leagues and in-play wagers.
France's online sports betting market grew strongly in 2025 even without a major international tournament on the calendar, according to l'Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ).
The regulator said the expansion was driven largely by a fuller football schedule and growing interest in smaller, less mainstream competitions, iGaming Business reported.
ANJ figures show 5.27 million active betting accounts last year, up 7.9%, while the number of distinct players climbed 8.6% to 3.65 million. The average bettor staked €3,159 ($3,533) across the year, a figure that has risen 25% since 2020.
Operators handed out €180 million in financial incentives, most of it in the form of retention bonuses, ANJ said.
The regulator's main concern centred on how risk is distributed across its four-tier player classification system, which ranks bettors as recreational, moderate risk, excessive or manifestly excessive.
Looking at data from the first half of 2026, ANJ found that more than 80% of stakes placed by excessive or manifestly excessive bettors went on competitions in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia — leagues that typically attract little casual betting interest.
Between 80% and 89% of all bets on sub-match outcomes, including half-time or quarter-time results and individual sets or games in tennis, were also placed by players in the excessive category.
ANJ stressed that this concentration does not necessarily point to a greater risk of addiction tied to these specific markets, but more likely reflects the near-total absence of recreational bettors in them. The regulator suggested the findings could inform future restrictions on which competitions and bet types operators are permitted to offer.
Separately, France's Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction estimated in 2024 that around 1.17 million people in the country showed signs of problematic gambling, with roughly 360,000 falling into the excessive category.
Total stakes with licensed operators reached €11.52 billion in 2025, a 12% rise, while gross gaming revenue climbed 10.4% to €1.766 billion, extending a recovery that began the previous year despite the absence of a tournament on the scale of the European Championship.
Football remained the dominant product, accounting for 54.9% of stakes at €6.32 billion and roughly two-thirds of GGR. ANJ noted that the headline 10.2% growth in football stakes actually understates the sport's momentum, since 2024 included €438 million in bets tied to the Euros; stripping that out, underlying growth is estimated at between 10% and 19%.
Tennis was the other major contributor, taking a 23% share of stakes worth €2.65 billion and growing 16% year-on-year despite no single marquee event.
A reformatted UEFA Champions League, which expanded from 137 to 189 matches, drove much of football's gains, with stakes on the competition up 48.6%. ANJ estimated around three-quarters of that rise came simply from the greater number of matches rather than higher spending per fixture.
The revamped Club World Cup also drew significant turnover, averaging about €3.9 million staked per match, close to the Champions League's €4.4 million average.
A Toluna-Harris Interactive survey of 1,071 French adults, carried out between 19 and 21 May, found that 41% of football followers intended to place real-money bets on the 2026 Fifa World Cup, a higher share than in previous surveys.
ANJ also tracked a divide in live-betting habits: in-play wagers made up around 26% of Champions League stakes and 30% to 35% for major domestic leagues, but rose to about 48% for secondary competitions and as high as 50% to 58% for second-tier European divisions and smaller leagues.
The regulator linked this to football's global fixture spread, with South American matches filling evening slots in France and Asian or Oceanian games airing during French mornings, effectively creating a near round-the-clock live betting window.
On payout rules, French law caps the annual average return to player for sports betting at 85% per operator; the market-wide average in 2025 stood at 84.67%, ANJ said.