Sports betting on the Internet has moved more than four billion euros in the last five years, according to the Portuguese Tourism Game Regulation and Inspection Service.
This sector had an exponential increase in 2021, when it registered a betting volume of around 1,402 million euros (ME), compared to 808 ME in 2020, 543 ME in 2019 and 392 ME in 2018.
According to an official source from the Secretary of State for Youth and Sports, contacted by Lusa, this increase in bets in Portugal reflects “a post-pandemic trend on a global scale.”
Still with no data for Q4 2022, previous reports indicated ME1,023 in betting volume this year: ME369.4 in Q1, ME305.5 in Q2 and ME348.2 in Q3.
The Covid-19 pandemic also affected the online sports betting sector, visible in the drop from ME 149.2 invested in the first quarter to ME 90.7 invested in the second, when practically all sports competitions were suspended. .
A period of recovery and an increase in turnover of around 300 ME per quarter followed, a bar that was widely exceeded in the best quarter of activity, the first of 2021, when online sports betting moved at 423.8 ME.
In the years 2018 and 2019, although significant, the amounts involved in the bets were more modest, with ME 391.8 in the first of the mentioned years and ME 543.2 in the second, largely due to the 185.7 ME of the last months of 2019.
The total number of sports bets placed between 2018 and 2022, even without the fourth quarter report, amounts to ME 4,169, which corresponds, in the same period, to ME 811.1 in gross revenue, the difference between the total amount of bets and the amount awarded in prizes.
Once again, 2021 was the most profitable year with ME251.1, with the best quarter of the reporting period being the first three months of 2022, when gross revenues amounted to ME77.7.
According to reports from the Portuguese Tourism Game Regulation and Inspection Service, gross billing from sports betting was ME78.9 in 2018, ME107.5 in 2019 and ME161.9 in 2020, below 2021 and also from last year, which in the first nine months, had already obtained a gross billing of 211.7 ME.
Source: TSF
