Key Points
- Superbet has set out a six-year, €500 million plan to conquer Greece’s betting market, with a big focus on sports sponsorships.
- Superbet reckons they already have a 7 to 8% market share, but the regulators can’t confirm that, or even publish any firm numbers on market share.
- By a weird coincidence, the Brazilian regulated market closed just a month before Superbet announced its Greek plan.
Superbet Sets a 6 Year Deadline to become Greece’s Top Betting Operator
It’s been just 7 months since Superbet entered the Greek market, and now they’re putting a number on their ambitions: a whopping €500 million over 6 years. The plan covers everything from sponsorships and marketing to new technology and staff training, but, annoyingly, no one has managed to pin down any sort of yearly spending plan. Apparently, the goal is to make Superbet the top of the list of favourite betting operators within 6 years, according to Giannis Kalambokis, their man in charge of Greece. Just to add a bit of extra complexity, their commercial chief Adam Lamentowicz went on record in August saying they have their sights set on getting into the top 3 within 3 years, so who knows what’s going on?
A 7% Market Share Claim that the Regulator can’t Verify
According to Superbet, they handled around €270 million in wagers on their platform in October, which is a pretty big number. However, they reckon that puts them well into the running for a 7 to 8% market share. The problem is, the Hellenic Gaming Commission doesn’t publish any market share figures for individual operators, so who can really say if this one’s on the money or not? And to make things even more confusing, the Commission’s own data suggests a monthly market worth of around €3 billion to €3.2 billion, which would put Superbet’s share at 8.4% to 9%. What’s going on here?
It turns out that the Commission’s numbers simply don’t add up to the numbers quoted by Superbet, and no one’s bothering to explain the difference. So now we’ve got two sets of numbers flying around, and no clear idea which one to go with. On the bright side, Superbet’s management did say that they smashed their 12-month targets in 7 months flat, which is great, but what exactly constitutes a “target” for this company? They’ve got 155 staff and reckon they’ve snatched up about 305,000 new players, but who knows what kind of maths they’re using to come up with that figure?
Contracts for Sports Sponsorship Dominate the Budget
Sports sponsorships form the basis of Superbet’s strategy. In particular, Kalambokis referred to sports sponsorships as a means “to enter quickly and directly”. As per OT, the company inked contracts for €100 million of sports sponsorship over the next four years. These figures exclude social responsibility programs and sports academies.
The shirt sponsorship agreements of Panathinaikos and PAOK have been signed for three years since just four days after the company launched on 30 March. In July, the Olympic basketball club signed a sponsorship deal until 2032, and AEK signed a three-year deal. On 2 July, the Football Federation made Superbet the sponsor of the Greek Cup and Super Cup for three years.
The iGB publication noted that the regulator’s 2025 annual report stated the overall amount spent on gambling advertising was roughly €130 million. The amount is calculated for one year, and thus Superbet’s €100 million cannot be compared with it. The report added that the regulator approved 1,301 advertising and marketing plans and rejected 156 of them. The Bioethics and Technoethics Commission recommended reducing teenagers’ exposure to betting advertisements. There have been no prohibitions on sponsorships so far.
Brazil Closes Down a Month Before the Briefing for Greece
Brazil’s regulated market closed down on 6 October as a result of the presidential measure banning fixed-odds betting. In August, Superbet was the second most visited licensed betting brand in Brazil. All licenses issued by the federal authorities were set to expire on 25 October. Reports covering the Greek briefing mention Brazil among Superbet’s markets.
The trade associations have challenged the ban before Brazil’s Supreme Court, and Congress is yet to make a decision on its future. None of the reports on the Greek briefing linked Brazil’s case with the €500 million budget.
Illegal Market Estimates Still All Over The Place
Executives in Greece have been pointing their finger at the illegal gambling scene as one of the biggest problems for their market. As Kalambokis pointed out there’s been some research that suggests illegal gambling is making a pretty penny, some €800 million a year in gross revenue, but unfortunately the reports don’t give us a clue where that figure came from. Meanwhile the government is using a different set of figures and a report from 2024 puts the turnover on the black market at a whopping €1.67 billion. And what’s more disturbing is that they reckon 799,000 people took part in this activity.
The ministry is using a different measure to estimate that they’re losing around €400 million in state revenue each year, and they’re linking that to the same 2024 report that highlighted the turnover figure. Then in October the Finance Minister, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, dropped another bombshell saying that €1.8 billion had been wagered on illicit websites in 2025, with a whopping 900,000 participants. And if that wasn’t enough the number of participants actually went up from nearly 800,000 the year before. Pierrakakis also revealed that there are around 15,000 blacklisted websites.
They’re also looking at 18 social media influencers who have been investigated over some complaints, but it’s worth noting that just because they’re under investigation doesn’t mean they’ve actually done anything wrong. A new law that came in this June, Law 5313/2026, sees anyone promoting an unlicensed operator facing fines of up to €50,000. In 2025 the regulator’s annual report came out and it revealed they’d blocked 12,642 dodgy domains, that’s up from 9,590. There were also 586 whistleblower tips. Kalambokis has been calling for them to tighten controls on payments as some of these illicit sites are trying to get around it by disguising betting charges as purchases of clothing.
All Hinges On The Operator’s Word
Superbet says they’ve got some measures in place to spot problem gamblers, but unfortunately the reports don’t have any independent corroboration of these measures being effective. They’re also touting that 100,000 of their players in Greece have signed up to their social feature called Supersocial. And just to remind everyone, betting always involves some level of risk, and the information provided here isn’t going to help you win a dime.
What’s Coming Down The Line?
The regulator is going to be publishing market data each month by the 10th, so that’ll give us a way to see how the plan is going. Kalambokis reckons high operating costs and the 35% tax on gaming revenue are putting a lot of pressure on the smaller operators. He didn’t rule out the possibility of mergers or partnerships between the different operators. They’re also keeping an eye on some new stadium projects and looking at signing more sponsorship deals.
A Pretty Shaky Affair, Expert Analysis: A Race Without a Scoreboard
We’ve taken the €500 million figure as an example of level annual spending because, quite frankly, no one’s published a yearly budget for Superbet. If they were to spread the amount evenly over six years though, that’s a yearly spend of around €83 million, which is pretty close to 7% of their expected online gross revenue for 2025. Now we know the total 2025 revenue was €3.07 billion, and of that €1.19 billion came from online, which is approximately 38.8% of the total.
Our biggest worry though, is the way Superbet’s been claiming a market share of 7% to 8%. The problem is, no publicly available data from regulators confirms that. You’d think having a target to become market leader would mean having a way to measure that progress, but unfortunately (and ironically), Greece doesn’t publish operator shares, so we can’t take Superbet’s claims at face value. Until they explain just where on earth the €3.2 billion monthly market estimate they’re quoting even comes from, in comparison to the average monthly revenue the regulator quotes at €1.46 billion, we’re just going to have to say that their market share claim is pretty unproven.
And don’t even get us started on sponsorship spending, add all this to the fact that there’s already advice on record to limit teenagers’ exposure to betting ads. With ad plans getting rejected at a rate of about 1 in 10 in 2025, we can’t possibly assume that the €100 million in signed sponsorship contracts they’ve got lined up isn’t a risk.
According to the minister’s figures, participation in the black market has actually gone up, from nearly 800,000 to about 900,000, and the number of blocked domains went up by roughly 3,000. Now let’s think about this, even though they’re blocking websites, the black market is still growing. You can’t just assume this problem will magically disappear in the next six years, which is what Superbet seem to be banking on with their six-year plan. For example, in Brazil, they actually got the whole market shut down just one month before the Greek briefing. That leaves us wondering, what else are the Greeks going to have to deliver to crack down on the problem? And if they never publish operator market shares, who exactly is going to tell us when Superbet “wins”?
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