Luc Goossens says the Dutch gambling market is judged at its illegal edge

Since the regulated online gambling market opened in October 2021, the Netherlands has used channelisation as its main test: are players staying with licensed operators, or drifting to illegal casinos? Luc Goossens, editor and analyst at the consumer platform oplichting.com, argues that the answer depends less on the licensed side’s revenue and more on where high-loss players end up.

1. Goossens says channelisation is simple in theory: people who want to gamble online should, as far as possible, use an operator licensed by the Kansspelautoriteit, the Dutch gambling authority. The Dutch model was built on regulation rather than prohibition, on the assumption that banning online gambling does not make it disappear.
2. The key distinction is between player channelisation and money channelisation. The latest KSA report put the share of players who gamble exclusively with legal operators at around 91 per cent, but an estimated 53 per cent of gross gaming revenue still ends up in the legal market. In other words, a relatively small group using illegal operators can account for a disproportionate share of losses.
3. That is why Goossens says the revenue of licensed operators is not the best measure. It shows the size of the regulated segment, but not whether the system is actually keeping higher-value or higher-loss play inside the licensed market. Channelisation, by contrast, is meant to show how the whole system is functioning.
4. His team at oplichting.com tracks the line between legal and illegal supply every day and keeps an up-to-date overview of legal online casinos in the Netherlands. From that vantage point, Goossens says illegal operators and the behavior of players who move to them are often the clearest signal of whether rules, limits, and restrictions are working as intended.
5. The policy tension is straightforward: the Dutch market can look orderly on paper, with rules on advertising, deposits, identification, and player protection, while still pushing some players toward the illegal side. For PSPs and acquiring partners, that is the useful takeaway — a market with high reported player channelisation can still have a serious leakage problem where the money actually goes.

For high-risk payment providers, the Dutch case is a reminder that headline compliance metrics do not always match revenue flow. If a market keeps most players licensed but loses a large share of gross gaming revenue to illegal operators, the real pressure point is not the visible regulated side; it is the edge where players cross over.