Key Points
- Licensed casinos capture a staggering 95.6% of player interest in Spain despite the fact that offshore operators make up a whopping 84% of the 534 active brands in the country.
- Blackjack is by far the most popular game in search terms but surprisingly, it only takes up less than 1% of the games actually available in licensed online casinos.
- Estimates of Spain’s unlicensed market vary wildly anywhere from 2.3% to 16% of the total market as a snap election freezes any chance of a Gambling Act rewrite.
The Great Offline Brand Conundrum
Spain has over 500 online casino brands trying to grab the attention of Spanish players but most of them appear to be invisible to their target audience. A new report from Blask, an outfit that specialises in tracking online casino search demand and game popularity, has thrown some fascinating light on this imbalance.
As per Blask’s latest Spain casino report published in October 2026, Spain currently has 534 active online casino brands. What’s striking is that 84% of these brands are run by offshore operators without a Spanish licence.
However, when it comes to actually raking in the player interest, the offshore operators are lagging woefully behind. With only 4.4% of search interest in their name, the 87 licensed operators in the country are capturing a massive 95.6% of the action. This is a pretty stark contrast to the two numbers.
Blask’s report wording requires a bit of attention to make sense of it all the company counts brands when calculating the offshore market share but calls them operators when referring to the licensed side of things. So while the two figures aren’t a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, the disparity is still telling.
Official records add another level of complexity to the picture. As of June 2025, only 77 operators had Spanish licences, with just 64 of them active and 52 offering casino games. This means that many licence holders are running multiple brands which is why market trackers and official registers often have a hard time agreeing on a single count.
Blackjack: The Popular Game You Won’t Find Anywhere
Blask took a close look at 15,871 casino games and compared what Spanish players are actually searching for with what online casinos actually offer. And the result is a picture of a pretty big mismatch between demand and supply.
Blackjack is by far the most searched-for game in Spain, accounting for a massive 38.3% of all game-related search demand. Most of these searches are for the game itself, not for any specific version of it offered by a particular studio.
However, on the actual online casino shelves, blackjack is a seriously underrepresented game making up less than 1% of all the games listed. Slots, on the other hand, are the real stars of the show coming in thousands of different versions and dominating the catalogues of both licensed and offshore casinos.
The contrast between demand and supply isn’t quite as dramatic as it seems at first glance. A few blackjack tables can handle the demand, while slots need constant novelty and sheer volume to keep players interested.
Live Dealers Make Their Mark
Licensed online casinos are clearly shifting their focus towards live dealer games where real dealers deal cards or spin roulette wheels over live video. Since January 2026, the share of live games in licensed online casino catalogues has increased by a factor of 2.7.
And where these games end up on a website is also telling. A live title appears in the top ten lobby positions of 46% of licensed online casinos compared to just 21% of offshore operators.
Lobby position matters because not many players scroll down very far on a website. Games that appear near the top of the homepage are far more likely to get played than titles that are buried further down.
One Supplier Dominates Both Sides of the Line
Pragmatic Play is the largest supplier on both sides of Spain’s regulatory line. It has 15.3% of licensed catalogue content and 11.2% of offshore catalogue content.
Below this supplier, the lists diverge sharply. Only four providers find themselves among the top ten for both sides: Pragmatic Play, Evolution, Play’n GO, and Hacksaw Gaming.
In Madrid, a gamer may be faced with quite a different list of studios according to whether the casino holds a licence in Spain. A licence affects the extent to which supplier games will reach across the operator.
Growing Market Behind the Figures
These data arrive against the backdrop of continued growth in Spain’s licensed market. Online gambling revenue amounted to a record €1.45 billion in 2024, a 17.6% increase compared to the previous year.
Casino revenue was €730.7 million and, alone, live roulette revenue reached €208.8 million. This early success in live gambling corresponds with the trend reported by Blask.
Growth continued in 2025. Spain’s online gambling revenue reached €1.73 billion in 2025, up 16.3%, of which 98% was taken by nationally licensed operators.
Four Estimates, Four Diverse Pictures
What is the size of the Spanish illegal gambling market? It heavily depends on who counts and how.
Blask uses the search interest measure and offline brands take 4.4% of it. It warns that the search demand reflects interest but not playing or spending.
The regulator estimates it by deposits. In his address at the Gaming in Spain conference on 15 October, DGOJ Director General Mikel Arana noted that illegal gambling has a share of less than 2.3% of deposits in several six-month periods.
There is another estimate from the industry’s survey. EY’s report on behalf of Jdigital, the Spanish trade association of online gambling, estimates that illegal online gambling created about €231 million, 16% of the regulated market, in 2024. The same report quotes a more modest 10% estimate from H2 Gambling Capital.
It should be noted that EY’s figure needs interpretation. According to the report, up to 23.4% of respondents said they would gamble in unregulated environments, based on 640 responses.
This percentage includes not only gamers who use unregulated platforms but also those who gamble on domains other than Spanish, for example .com or .bet. Actually, only 9.3% of respondents use unlicensed platforms.
Reform Frozen in the Election Countdown
The row over these numbers has now got a strict political deadline. Back in May 2026, Spain’s gambling regulator the DGOJ put out a call for comments on revising the rules for Law 13/2011 essentially the guidelines for not only influencer advertising but also for promotions to customers and all the wrong types of gambling.
Just when the DGOJ was hoping to get some proposals onto the table, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called an election for 29 November. This caught everything in a bit of a bind because Parliament got dissolved on 6 October, before even the first draft of a reform bill could even get to them.
But Arana still claimed they’d stick to their guns and keep working on getting the reform bill ready in time. “We remain 100% committed to getting the reform proposal put on the table by the end of the current term,” he said at the conference. The problem is, with Parliament already having been dissolved, any bill that Arana comes up with will effectively just land on the desk of the new government. Deposit limits, however, are a different story as they are already law due to Royal Decree 520/2026.
Those limits are a bit harsh set at €700 a day, €1,750 a week and €3,300 over four weeks. But a 6-month trial did kick off on 25 September so that people can see how it all works, and the full rollout is due on 25 March 2027.
Expert Insights: Everyone Is Reading the Numbers They Like
We reckon the debate in Spain over offshore gambling is being driven more by who is putting out the numbers, rather than what the numbers actually say. Each report seems to back up the point its authors were already making anyway.
The DGOJ’s sub-2.3 % deposit figure supports their claim that the rules aren’t pushing players to gamble on unlicensed websites. Then there’s Arana’s review which found that tighter rules on advertising didn’t actually make people go to the wrong kind of sites.
On the other hand, Jdigital’s EY survey which was pretty much pushed out to Jdigital’s member operators suggests that heavy restrictions make the licensed offer much less appealing. None of these figures is necessarily wrong, but in our view, people should take them for what they are just sides in the ongoing policy battle, rather than some kind of neutral fact.
Blask’s 4.4% sits right in the middle of the row, and we reckon it’s going to be the hardest for the industry lobby to explain. If nearly a quarter of players were actually taking their business to unlicensed sites, we would expect the unlicensed operators to be a lot more popular but they just aren’t.
There are limits to search data though, EY found that players who spent more than €600 a month accounted for 61.4% of unregulated spending so the search numbers can’t give those high spenders the same weight as casual players. How players actually end up on some of these sites also matters a great deal. Among players who gambled on unlicensed sites, a whopping 38% found them through social media and 12% through Telegram which is pretty low compared to the 4% of other gamblers who use Telegram.
Websites and online searches still brought in 35% of the illegal users so search remains one of the routes offshore. Our take is that the real footprint offshore of Spanish gamblers sits somewhere above Blask’s search share, but below the industry’s preferred figure.
That’s just our hypothesis though we haven’t actually proven it yet. The fact is, Spain just doesn’t have a neutral measure that either the regulator or the industry will accept.
The blackjack data then throws up an awkward problem for licensed casinos themselves. Spanish players clearly love blackjack and live tables yet the lobbies in licensed casinos are still largely full of slots.
Share
4 views
