Euromat study says Europe’s illegal online gambling market will reach €12,000 million in net revenue by 2025, taking 25% of the market

A new study commissioned by Euromat puts Europe’s unregulated online gambling ecosystem at €12,000 million in net revenue by 2025, up threefold since 2019 and equal to 25% of the total online gambling market. For PSPs, the useful part is not the headline number — it is the mechanism: regulation that adds consumer friction appears to be creating room for black-market operators, with crypto and affiliate networks helping them scale.

1. The research was carried out by Regulus Partners and Helios, using more than 1,000 hours of forensic analysis. The study combines digital marketing and web traffic data with macroeconomic and sociopolitical context, with a focus on the impact of country-specific regulatory interventions.
2. Filip Jelavić mag.iur., owner and project lead at HELIOS, said the study covered 28 European online gambling markets: the EU27 excluding Malta and Luxembourg, plus the United Kingdom, Serbia and Montenegro. In his words, the team used data-led forensic analysis on behalf of Euromat to identify the size, growth trends, characteristics and key drivers of the black-market ecosystem.
3. The study links black-market growth to national policy choices rather than accident. Jelavić said the pattern comes from consumer friction created by government policy, including limited options caused by state monopolies, low visibility, price distortions and interventionist measures such as affordability checks that block or inconvenience normal customer behavior.
4. Crypto is described as a major enabler of black-market brands. The report says the rapid growth of crypto has helped build these businesses by offering product differentiation and ways to bypass regulation, while very few European jurisdictions allow consumers to use cryptocurrencies for legal betting. That has created both consumer demand for crypto and a pull from unregulated ecosystems.
5. For smaller, long-tail operators, the study says affiliate networks provide a cost-effective way to acquire players, and one that is extremely difficult for authorities to control. For payment teams, that matters because the acquisition layer and the payment layer are increasingly tied together in high-risk gambling flows.

Euromat describes itself as the voice of Europe’s land-based entertainment industry, while Helios is a digital research consultancy focused on gambling web traffic. The practical takeaway for PSPs and acquirers is straightforward: if regulation makes legal journeys harder, unregulated alternatives get better at conversion, and they increasingly use crypto and affiliates to do it.