Monopolies have no place to hide

29 June 2010
The World Cup has reached crunch time, with the knockout stages now well underway. The football on display has after a slow start picked up significantly, and now, the goals are flowing the controversy is raging and those blasted Vuvuzelas are still irritating the masses. Yet aside from enjoying what has been a feast of football, at Right2bet, we've been monitoring the tournament with our campaign hats firmly in place. It's been well documented how this summer's competition is going to be the biggest betting even of all time, and we therefore felt that it would be fitting to commission a report on the odds offered on every single game, by Europe's monopolies and private competitors. The reason we wanted to do this was that the opportunity to track and analyze the odds offered throughout such a major competition would we hope provide our campaign with something to shout about. Millions of Europeans are ripped off by the betting monopolies that their governments force them to use. The value they are offered is significantly inferior to the value offered by the banned (yet licensed elsewhere) competition. The World Cup report we're in the process of compiling will show succinctly, exactly the type of value a punters was offered, dependent on the services legally available to them. Monopolies, in Sweden, Holland, Germany and Greece are all being tracked, as are the two 'former' monopolies in France, the FDJ and the PMU. The results out of France will be particularly insightful, since they will show whether or not the new French licensing regime has actually worked. We've voiced our concerns over what we see as the restrictive and bias new French gambling law, and our report should show us whether or not consumers in France are actually better off as a result of the legislation. We'll be publishing the full report as quickly as we can after the tournament ends, but as a quick preview, we can tell you that so far, on average, customers of the monopolies are 20% worse off. We hope the report will provide compelling evidence to the Industry and its regulators that change is needed, and we hope that it will show European consumers why signing our petition, and backing the right2bet campaign is so important.


Ari Last

Ari writes and reports about European gambling issues for Right2Bet, an organization dedicated to allowing EU citizens to be able to bet with whichever EU-licensed betting company they wish, regardless of in which member state that company is based.