ANJ reports French sports betting stakes reach €11.5bn in 2025
France's gambling regulator says football and tennis growth pushed sportsbook turnover up 12% in 2025, while flagging heavy reliance on excessive bettors in minor leagues.
French sports betting turnover rose 12% to €11.5bn (£9.7bn) in 2025, according to the Autorité Nationale des Jeux, the country's national gambling regulator, in its latest market review.
Gross gaming revenue climbed 10.4% to €1.7bn over the same period. The ANJ pointed out that 2025 contained no major international tournament, unlike 2024, when the football European Championship alone generated €438m in bets, meaning the underlying growth in the vertical sits somewhere between 10% and 19% depending on how it is measured.
Football remains the dominant product, taking almost 55% of all stakes at €6.32bn, and it was responsible for close to half of the industry's growth in turnover and two-thirds of its growth in revenue.
A large share of that expansion came from an enlarged fixture list rather than punters simply betting more. The Champions League grew from 137 matches in 2024 to 189 in 2025, a 38% jump, and stakes on the competition rose 48.6%. The ANJ estimated three-quarters of that increase is explained purely by the extra matches, with average stakes per fixture climbing only modestly in line with wider market trends. The Europa League and Conference League, despite an identical change in format, saw far smaller gains, which the regulator attributed to the Champions League's greater prestige.
The newly expanded Club World Cup also performed strongly in its debut edition, generating average stakes of €3.9m per match, close to the Champions League's €4.4m average.
Paris Saint-Germain's involvement proved decisive for single-match turnover: the club's Champions League final and Club World Cup final were the two highest-staked matches of the year, drawing €38.2m and €26.7m respectively.
Tennis, which took 23% of total stakes, grew 16% year-on-year even without any standout events, the ANJ said, underlining how betting behaviour differs by sport. The NBA alone made up 54% of basketball wagers, seven tournament categories covered 94% of tennis bets, and just 35 of the 103 eligible football competitions accounted for 90% of all football stakes.
The regulator stressed that turnover figures reflect punter activity and a sport's underlying dynamics, whereas gross gaming revenue is shaped more by operator pricing and the unpredictability of results. It said shifting margins, not changes in betting behaviour, explain why growth in revenue often lags growth in stakes: tennis stakes rose 16% but revenue only 8.6%, rugby stakes rose 11.4% against a 3.4% revenue increase, while volleyball saw a 21% rise in stakes alongside a sharper 47.2% jump in revenue.
Implied payout rates varied widely by sport, running from the mid-80s for football and basketball up towards 90% for rugby, with the ANJ noting that lower-volume sports show even wider swings because unpredictable results carry more weight in the annual calculation — ice hockey, cycling and mixed martial arts all produced markedly different outcomes, with MMA recording a negative gross gaming revenue figure of €9m for the year.
French operators are bound by an annual cap limiting the maximum share of stakes returned to bettors to 85%. The ANJ recorded an average payout ratio of 84.67% across the market in 2025. A run of results favourable to bettors in September pushed that month's figure to 94.5%, lifting the cumulative rate to 85.9%, which prompted operators to cut payout ratios to 82.3% in October and 74.2% in November to bring the year-end average back to the regulatory ceiling.
Looking at football betting in the first half of 2026, the ANJ found that bettors it classifies as excessive made up more than 80% of stakes on less prominent leagues, including those in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia, while recreational bettors concentrated their activity on headline events such as the 2026 World Cup.
The same split showed up across bet types: recreational customers favoured straightforward match or tournament outcomes, while excessive bettors accounted for between 80% and 89% of in-play stakes depending on the sport. The ANJ said the findings could feed into tougher player-protection rules for licensed platforms.
Live betting's share of turnover also tracked the profile of the competition, running at 26% to 35% for the Champions League and major domestic leagues, rising to around 48% for second-tier competitions, and reaching 50% to 58% for European second divisions and lesser-known leagues, with South American, Asian and Oceanian competitions filling out global broadcast slots.