National Olympic Sports Federation Joins the Call to Change German Gambling Laws

Online sportsbooks in Germany are thriving, but that’s actually bad news. Thanks to the current state of German gambling laws, an overwhelming 94% spend their gambling wages at foreign-owned operators’ sites: sites that go untaxed by the central government and thus benefit none of the country’s citizens. 

A couple of huge sporting powers in the country are now teaming up to encourage changes to standing law, as the German Olympic Sports Federation recently announced they’d like to see the legal structure as regards gambling completely reworked when licensing for the national monopoly provider comes up for renewal in 2011. The Bundesliga soccer league has long been a proponent of such changes as well. 

Bundesliga executive Christian Seifert recently commented that “The retention of a dysfunctional sports betting monopoly has made it difficult to prevent betting manipulation, affecting the sports funding that is spread from top to bottom.”  

Though Seifert is also talking about potential sponsorship of soccer clubs by big-name online sportsbooks such as BWin and SportingBet, proof of his contention on the average punter’s level was recently provided in a study of World Cup betting that showed Lotto Bayern’s online sportsbook Oddset to have offered 48% worse lines than the average bookmaker during the tournament.  

The federation not only joins with Bundesliga in promoting a reworking of the system, but also with quite a few analysts such as Professor Ulrich Schmidt of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, who has put forth a workable scheme to allow state-owned operators to compete with private companies for the nearly €9 million in annual revenue generated by internet betting in Germany.