Sports clubs may win from EU gambling ruling, expert says (Extra)

Sep 8, 2010, 14:30 GMT

Cologne, Germany - German sports clubs such as football giants Bayern Munich may end up as the big winners from an EU court ruling that overturns a gambling monopoly, an expert in Cologne forecast Wednesday.

If private football-pools companies could legally advertise in Germany, they would pay to put their logos on players' jerseys, explained Max Stahl of Sport und Markt, a Cologne market-research company. That revenue is currently unavailable to sports clubs.

'We assume that the lost revenue amounts to more than 300 million euros (385 million dollars) per year,' Stahl told the German Press Agency dpa in an interview.

Germany's existing football-pool betting game is run by Oddset, a consortium of state lottery commissions which are major benefactors to sport. Some observers fear sport will lose those funds if the monopoly is axed after the ruling from judges in Luxembourg.

Facing a string of legal challenges from commercial gambling operators, the German state and federal governments have struggled for the past five years to bring the monopoly into line with EU rules.

Bayern Munich chief Franz Beckenbauer has asserted in the past that clubs miss out on 400 million euros annually in 'sponsorship' money from commercial bookmakers. Clubs such as Real Madrid have to take gambling ads off their shirts when playing in Germany.

'The German market could catch up quite quickly. The competition alone would push up the value to be on the leading shirts,' said Stahl.

He said French betting operators spent 20 million euros last year alone in France in advertising on player uniforms after a state monopoly in France fell, and their injection of funds into professional sport totalled 75 to 80 million euros.

Stahl said football currently sucked up 67 per cent of the available promotional money in Germany from the top 100 sponsors, but gambling advertising might bring a boost to the minor sports.

Disciplines where scores change fast in the course of a game, such as tennis, basketball and handball, were more attractive for real-time betting, Stahl commented.

Among other groups which welcomed the court ruling was Bitkom, the digital-industry federation, which backs new internet businesses.

In Berlin, Bitkom president August-Wilhelm Scheer said, 'A ban on private operators is just not sustainable on the internet. This is an opportunity to set clear rules for a free market in betting in Germany, including rules to deal with the dangers.'

The current German rules, which ban German operators offering online betting, were set up in 2008 under an agreement between the 16 German states. Punters in Germany often use foreign websites to bet.

Bitkom said its data showed 1.7 million German men and 300,000 German women bet online.