Do you remember the financial crisis in 2008? It was a tough one. Most segments of the economy suffered from the drop and the markets such as the Stock Exchange were most of the time losing. Real estate market dropped down and in some regions fully recovered only after 2016. There was however one segment that was mostly quiet during the mentioned period. We are indeed talking about sports betting and gambling in general. Back then, during those hard times was gambling steady. Not growing profits, but not losing either. Steady, one can say, not worth mentioning. But what about now? Is sportsbook across Europe doing good now? Now when there is a decent selection of fixtures… Are the UK online casinos making profit? Together with the experts at Top10casinos portal we analyzed the current situation across Europe, taking into focus licensed UK casinos and significant Global sportsbook operators.
No sports means no sports betting
Let’s go back to march 2020. Nobody could ever imagine the World stopping for about 2 months and yet it happened. As we analyzed the financial reports from bookies from Central Europe such as Czech Republic or Slovakia, within the second quarter of 2020 dropped the levies (6% from the stake amount) of the most significant operators from around 7 million EUR to less than 1 million. The governments did not set any limits to gambling, it simply happened by not enough fixtures to bet on combined with upcoming economical uncertainty. This uncertainty turned into reality a soon hit even the big football clubs.
We from Rowdie remember only exotic leagues such as Belarus, Nepal or amateur Swedish division being the only ones still in play. Not really an attractive selection for the majority of football punters. Other sports events such as darts or virtual sports are also not the most popular pick.
Casinos were not suffering
…at least not yet. The reports from the period of March – May of a variety of casino operators were somewhere between stable and optimistic. No casino provided us with numbers, but our direct question about how they are doing was never answered with “business is going down”. Not until the governments stepped in… As the time passed, the politicians began to realize the severity of the situation.
One fact is: The economical crisis coming out of this is inevitable and the last thing you need is to make the misery even worse. Politicians in Spain, Belgium or Sweden… started to protect their people by setting limits to gambling. E.g. in Spain no advertisement was allowed, in Sweden or Belgium the gambling commission set weekly deposit limits. We believe more countries will follow these steps and that means real problems for the gambling operators.
We are not questioning the necessity of setting the limits. Gambling is really not adding too much value to people’s life – especially not in tough times such as those we go through. For the gambling operators this however means a significant “heads up”. We have addressed the same question to casino operators mid October 2020 and the voice reply was no more that optimistic. As we learned later, some of our points of contacts were no more working there and we can only speculate why (we dare to say it was not their choice).
Other replies were official like a press release – imagine this like an answer given by politicians, where you can not figure out wtf they really said. Those, who really answered were not optimistic at all. All answers were lacking positive emotions and therefor we know gambling is going through hard times just like other industries.
The real deal we are about to learn by the end of the year, but we already know that for the first time within the last decades gambling is going to suffer together with the rest of the World.
