Little wonder, therefore, that a liberalisation of the Spanish gaming laws has attracted especially close interest from the international gambling industry, which sees a huge potential for expansion into this naturally well-primed and eager market. Many of the hopeful investors are well-known names above the betting shops of many a British high street and look set to stage yet another Invasion of British culture into everyday life in Spain.
If you’ve ever spent longer than a week in Spain, you’ll know that the lottery is something of a national obsession and you’ll probably have noticed that one of the most heavily used facilities in your local café or tapas bar is the slot machine in the corner.
In the workplace, you’ll have heard countless privately made bets being laid on the outcome of the forthcoming Grand Prix or tennis tournament. Link every Spaniard’s obsession with football to this propensity for gambling and you’ve got still more fertile ground for betting on the results of football matches. At home, too, many Spaniards have been frequent and heavy - though illegal - users of on-line gambling services.
It’s impossible to say for sure, of course, whether all the legal prohibitions have in themselves encouraged the passion for gambling. But there are several medical and social research papers published in Spain during the 1990s depicting a fairly widespread problem of “pathological gambling” through the legally available outlets of casinos, slot machines and bingo (the first of these studies in fact took as its sample population for exhaustive interviewing some 568 individuals living in Seville).
Nevertheless, liberalisation of the gambling laws - which will allow high street betting shops - is definitely on the cards, with British names such as Betfred, William Hill and Stanleybet already queuing up to get a part of the action. Betfred, for example, which is the fourth-largest betting chain in Britain, is planning to set up the first betting shops in Spain, starting in Bilbao.
Bilbao is the capital of the Basque Country which is the first Spanish region to reform its laws to permit high street betting shops. It is where the English company, Betfred therefore, has signed an agreement with its Basque counterpart, Ekasa, to build and operate a string of shops to be called Reta - the Spanish for “dare”. Initially, at least, most of the betting is expected to be on football matches, especially the premier La Liga. Horse racing exists in Spain, of course, but it is far less popular.
The Betfred-Ekasa partnership has bid for all the concessions which the regional government plans to grant. If the gambling consortium succeeds in its bids, it will have struck a rich seam indeed - the Basques are reputed to be so fanatical about gambling that they have been known to place bets on poetry contests!
What is more, investors are likely to regard the outcome of the Basque experiment as something of a model. Madrid’s regional government is also in the throes of passing new laws liberalising betting and this is being watched carefully by another big English name, Stanleybet (which sold its UK betting shops to the William Hill chain in 2005). William Hill themselves have recently signed a deal with Codere, a Spanish gambling company that operates more than 30,000 slot machines and bingo halls across Spain.
After Madrid, both Catalonia and Andalusia are likely to follow suit.
In this day and age, of course, the high street betting shop is only one gambling arena. A very significant volume of gambling these days is done online. Here, too, Spain has been relaxing its laws to allow regulated online betting. Following a decision last December, people in Spain now can legally place bets and wager over the phone and online.
Market research has shown that in 2004 only 10% of Spanish residents with an internet connection actually visited an online gambling site. But given the recent growth of broadband in Spain over the past year those statistics probably doubled in last year alone.
Juega Poker Ya, for instance, is a site dedicated to Spanish poker-playing for Spanish residents and is owned by the largest operator of European gaming networks, the St Minver white label games network. Since its launch, Juega claims to have seen an increase in the numbers of players signing up of some 30% each month, with an average cash drop per player almost twice that for the UK.
Over 12 million people worldwide played poker online last year, with the global market continuing to grow at more than 10% every month. Thousands of budding Spanish poker players are queuing up to learn how to play the game that is the epitome of card-gaming n the hope of repeating the success of Spanish poker supremo Carlos Mortenson, World Poker Champion just three years ago.
So are the signs there that Spanish players will take hold of this online gambling phenomenon? Well, of the 40 million people in Spain, with 37% now having internet access, the potential for money making is there, and certainly companies will find it tempting to delve into the Spanish markets in the hope of tempting Europe’s most eager gamblers to part with their well earned cash.
Whether it’s in the high street bookies or at online poker tables, therefore, it seems that gambling is not only here to stay in Spain, but about to see the sort of growth that has already been experienced throughout most of the rest of the European Union - it will do much to satisfy the appetites of Spanish gamblers, and even more to satisfy the profits-search of international gaming companies.
