The expansion of football and tennis betting products has driven huge growth in French betting.
Sports betting stakes grew 12% to €11.5bn (£9.7bn) in 2025, according to the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), France’s national gambling regulator. GGR also increased 10.4% to €1.7bn during the same period.
ANJ noted that the growth happened despite there being no major sporting event in 2025 and, with 2024 benefiting from the football Euro tournament, during which French bookmakers recorded €438m in bets, the vertical’s “growth ranges between +10% and +19% depending on the criteria used” to measure it.
In common with many other markets, football is the most popular sport on which French punters bet at nearly 55% of stakes totalling €6.32bn. It contributed nearly half of the industry’s growth in stakes and two-thirds of its GGR growth.
However, the growth is also a result of “the expansion of the offering itself, with the Champions League increasing from 137 matches in 2024 to 189 in 2025, a 38% increase in the number of matches, with stakes rising 48.6%.
“Three-quarters of this increase can be attributed to the rise in the number of matches, with the average stake per match rising more moderately, in line with the general increase in betting activity observed across the segment,” noted ANJ.
However, the prestige of the Champions League also plays a key role – the Europa and Conference Leagues only saw modest growth despite undergoing the same format changes.
Reflecting the importance of high profile sports stars, ANJ said the new Club World Cup competition achieved stakes per match of €3.9m million in its first edition, not far off those of the Champions League at €4.4m.
Margin control shapes growth
ANJ clarified that only stakes reflect changes in punters’ activity and the dynamics of a sport, whilst GGR “provides more insight into the operator’s pricing policy and results” since it “depends on three factors: the volume of bets, the pricing applied by operators, and the unpredictability of sporting results”.
At market level, the rise in the net betting yield automatically explains the gap between the growth in bets (+12.0 per cent) and that of GGR (+10.4 per cent).
However, the gap is more pronounced for certain sports: tennis saw a 16% increase in stakes but only an 8.6% rise in GGR, while rugby saw an 11.4% rise in stakes for a 3.4% rise in GGR, while volleyball recorded a 21% rise in stakes and a 47.2% uptick in GGR.
ANJ said: “The discrepancy is due to a shift in margins rather than a change in punters’ behaviour. The variation in the RTP across sports reflects both operators’ pricing and the unpredictability of results: the implied RTP stands at 83.4% for football, 84.8% for basketball, 85.2% for volleyball, 86.7% for tennis and 90% for rugby.
“This variation extends to low-volume sports, where the unpredictability of results has a greater impact on the annual RTP (78.7% for ice hockey, 90.1% for cycling, and a negative GGR of €9m for MMA).”
The PSG factor
National interest also plays a key role. The matches with the highest stakes of the year were PSG’s Champions League and Club World Cup finals (€38.2m and €26.7m).
Betting on tennis, at 23% of total stakes, was up 16% YoY, despite there being no “exceptional events” but the betting patterns varied considerably according to each sport.
The NBA accounted for 54% of all basketball bets, 94% of tennis bets were spread across seven categories of tournaments, while for football 35 competitions accounted for 90% of bets, “out of the 103 competitions open for betting”, added ANJ.
French bookmakers have to abide by a return to player ratio that is capped at 85% over the course of the year. Representing the maximum proportion of funds paid out on average to players by bookmakers, ANJ said operators’ RTP stood at 84.67% in 2025.
With sports results favouring punters during September, that month’s RTP rose to 94.5%, which pushed the overall RTP to 85.9%. As a result, the RTP ratios for October and November were lowered to 82.3% and 74.2% respectively, which “brought the cumulative figure back down to 84.67% by the end of November”, said ANJ.
The figure covers all the operators active in France and individual sportsbooks’ RTP is monitored separately.
ANJ: Care on excessive risks
Analysis of football betting in the first half of 2026 found that excessive bettors account for a higher proportion of wagers on less popular competitions.
They represented more than 80% of bets on the Brazilian, Saudi Arabian, Japanese and Australian leagues, while recreational bettors favoured major events such as the 2026 World Cup.
Similar patterns emerged across bet types: recreational players preferred tournament outcomes, while excessive bettors accounted for 80% to 89% of stakes on in-play outcomes, depending on the sport. These findings could support stronger player-protection requirements for licensed betting platforms, added ANJ.
The scale of live betting is contingent on the popularity of the event: for Champions League and major national leagues it’s 26% per 30–35% respectively, but rises to 48% on secondary competitions and can reach 50–58% on European second divisions and other little-known leagues, while South American and Asian and Oceanian leagues cover the global time slots for content.