The recent alleged match-fixing scandal in the first and second Belgium soccer league has caused the Belgium National Lottery (NL) to abandon its plan to reintroduce sports betting.
That's what they say at least.
The bad publicity and the handling of the cross border (China, Belgium, The Netherlands, Finland, etc,) football corruption case by Belgian prosecutors and the Belgian Football Association has given the NL a good excuse not to launch their new product called Odd Set. For many years the sports betting vacuum in Belgium has been filled by the UK's Internet bookies. It is too late of course for the NL to try to compete with the commercial cross border wagering companies.
The Belgian NL, which was called Le Lotto when it was founded in 1975, has only offered sports betting products for a brief time period in its history-- between the years 1980 and 1985. Even then only wagering on soccer was offered (pool: 1,2,x).
Soccer and especially bike racing are by far the favorite sports of the 10+ million inhabitants of the constitutional Kingdom of Belgium, but there are no sports betting products offered by the NL, which is a member of the European Lotteries.
What is even stranger is that for 20 years NL was the sole sponsor of a professional race-cycling team named Lotto that has often been very successful. Since last year however the bike team has been sponsored in conjunction with another company and consequently renamed Davitamon-Lotto.
Such a race team has more than 25 professional riders under contracts in addition to a staff of at least 30 that includes 4 doctors. And in Lotto's case there is also a great Internet sports betting vehicle, but the company doesn't utilize it, even though new products such as Velotto have been developed for betting on race-cycling results.
Listed below are the company's key financial for 2005. It is not a report card I would like to come home with. If the European Lotteries had not introduced their cross border Euro Millions, then these results would have been disastrous.
Key financial 2005 in euro (followed by 2004 figures):
Lotteries: 220,086,885.22 (240,369,023.75)
Lotto: 637,961,673.00 (722,245,071.50)
Joker: 60,146,893.75 (67,428,620.00)
Ken: 14,474,266.25 (15,689,946.25)
Pick 3: 4,128,961.00 (4,204,120.00)
Eur Millions: 186,816,632.00 (28,724,504.00)
Total: 1,123,615,311.22 (1,078,661,285.50)
Can you imagine that in China they bet on Belgian second league soccer matches?
As of yet, however, Belgium's NL still has no Internet gambling products.