bet365 Scores and Juventus: The Infotainment Deal Exposing Italy’s Broken Betting Ban

Key Points

• bet365 Scores has been appointed Juventus’s official sports infotainment partner, mirroring the legal framework used in its earlier SSC Napoli arrangement.
• Italy’s 2018 Dignity Decree prohibits direct betting sponsorships in football, stripping Serie A clubs of an estimated €80–100m per year in commercial income.
• Italy’s third straight World Cup absence has sharpened calls to repeal the ban, yet no legislative change has followed.

bet365 and Juventus: The Deal Nobody Is Pretending Is Simple

The language in the announcement was careful, almost surgical. Juventus has appointed bet365 Scores, the firm’s livescore and media platform, as its “official sports infotainment partner” in Italy. No shirt logo. No sportsbook branding. No direct financial thread connecting a bookmaker to a football club. Just a statistics app and one of the world’s most recognisable football institutions, tied together through an arrangement the entire industry reads fluently.

bet365 ranks among the largest online betting operators in the world. Juventus is the most decorated club in Serie A history. A direct commercial arrangement between them in Italy is prohibited by law, so what exists instead is a well-practised workaround, years in the making, honed across deal after deal.

How an Eight-Year-Old Law Rewired Italian Football’s Commercial Machine?

The Italian Dignity Decree was enacted on 14th July 2018, putting in place a blanket ban on gambling advertisements and sponsorships within Italy. Existing contracts had a period of grace up to 1st January 2019; thereafter, teams were locked out of one of the quickest-growing business sectors.

The industry did not absorb the loss. Methodically, operators constructed sub-brands: media platforms carrying sports news, live scores, and statistics, bearing names closely associated with their parent sportsbooks but operating without an Italian gambling licence. Those entities approached clubs not as betting sponsors but as infotainment or media partners, a distinction that regulators have not challenged in court.

bet365 Scores sits squarely within that structure. This application offers users access to live match data, personalised notifications for clubs and scores feed, without an Italian-facing betting option. Juventus justified its partnership by its fans and not its commercial wing saying: “This partnership comes out of the shared ambition to place the fans at the centre and provide them with easy-to-use, quick and customizable ways of following their team and being updated about results and live statistics from wherever they are, be it at home, while traveling, working or watching the game at the stadium.”

Not a Standalone Deal: The Strategy bet365 Has Been Running in Italy

bet365 Scores has done this before. The platform established an equivalent infotainment arrangement with SSC Napoli in summer 2025, planting the same structural flag at another of Serie A’s leading clubs. The Juventus deal extends that footprint rather than opening a new one.

Elsewhere in the market, the template has been operating longer still. Betsson Sport claimed the front-of-shirt position at Inter Milan in July 2024 through its own infotainment sub-brand, with Inter billing it as the largest shirt deal in the club’s history, all routed through a media property rather than a sportsbook. Italy’s Sports Minister Andrea Abodi stated plainly that the Dignity Decree had been “constantly circumvented in practice.” By February 2025, the Italian Senate had launched proceedings to review or repeal the restriction, with its 7th Commission declaring the rules “unviable for Italian sports.” Reform was discussed. Nothing was enacted.

Italy’s Scale Explains Why Every Operator Is Still at the Table

Italy is not a secondary market for bet365. The Blask index places the country third in Europe by Competitive Earnings Baseline, sitting behind only the UK and Russia at US$6.4bn spread across 185 brands. Within that field, bet365 occupies the fourth-largest position by market share.

November 2025 brought the most significant restructuring Italian online gambling has seen in a decade. More than 400 operating domains were folded into 52 licences, awarded to 46 operators under Legislative Decree No. 41/2024. Each concession carried a price tag of €7m for a nine-year term, with the licensing round generating €364m for the Italian state, exceeding the government’s own projections. The process filtered out smaller operators and concentrated the market around those with the capital to compete. bet365 secured its place.

Italy’s government declared €6.66bn in non-lottery gambling tax and duties across 2025, confirming the regulated sector’s weight even before any relaxation of the sponsorship restrictions. The country’s tax framework has drawn favourable comparisons with heavier structures in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany, adding to its appeal for operators weighing market priorities.

The Financial Hole the Decree Left Behind

Serie A clubs have shed an estimated €80–100m per year since the Dignity Decree came into force, according to figures from Lega Serie A and industry group LOGiCO. Across the ban’s lifespan, cumulative losses have climbed past €700m, stripping clubs of transfer budget, stadium investment, and scouting capacity at exactly the point when European rivals were deepening their commercial revenues.

Italy’s third consecutive World Cup absence, sealed by a penalty shootout defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 2026, sharpened that conversation into something close to a political crisis. Former FIGC president Gabriele Gravina, who resigned in the aftermath, had spent years arguing that repealing the Decree and introducing a “right-to-bet” model, redistributing a portion of gambling revenues back into football infrastructure, was the clearest route to rebuilding the domestic game. His scheduled hearing before the Chamber of Deputies’ Culture Committee was cancelled when he stepped down.

The FIGC presidential election on 22 June 2026 confirmed a new leader without producing a policy break. Giancarlo Abete, the candidate who had positioned himself as the clearest advocate for overturning the Decree, lost his bid for the federation’s top role. The ban remains in force.

Expert Analysis

Taken on its own, the bet365 Scores and Juventus deal is commercially contained. A livescore platform partnership produces brand recognition rather than the shirt exposure or perimeter board presence a full betting sponsorship would generate. The value is tangible but structurally narrow.

The harder question is what the accumulation of these deals means for the Dignity Decree itself. Each infotainment arrangement signed reinforces the industry’s working argument: that the ban is not preventing betting companies from operating alongside football clubs, only preventing them from doing so transparently. Italy’s Sports Minister acknowledged the decree had been circumvented, and the Senate’s 7th Commission reached the same conclusion when it opened its review proceedings in early 2025.

Three World Cup absences in a row have shifted public sentiment in ways that dry regulatory debate could not. The political framing that sustained the Decree in 2018 was built around protecting vulnerable consumers; the framing that now competes with it centres on a national sport in financial and competitive decline. Neither argument has yet won outright. Until one does, bet365 Scores and Juventus will continue their partnership on the terms Italy’s law currently permits, the same terms that have been quietly, patiently reassembling betting’s presence inside Serie A for years.