Gambling Monopolies are losing the public – Vedonlyontiyhtiot.com data shows why
Finland has spent decades defending its state gambling monopoly on public health grounds. A survey of 1,007 active Finnish bettors conducted by Vedonlyontiyhtiot in late 2025 suggests the public has already made up its own mind.
Only 3.2% of respondents named the domestic monopoly, Veikkaus, as their primary betting platform. The other 96.8% had gone elsewhere, mostly to EU-licensed, tax-free alternatives operating out of Malta and Estonia.
When policy and behavior diverge
The gap between what gambling regulation intends and what consumers actually do is not a new problem. Research published in the International Journal of Social Welfare finds that most European countries have moved toward licensing-based systems partly because monopoly structures struggled to hold consumer behavior in place once digital alternatives became available. Finland held out longer than most and this data captures the result.
The Vedonlyontiyhtiot.com study is transparent about its scope. Respondents are newsletter subscribers: active, informed bettors rather than a random population sample. That framing matters. What the data describes is not what casual players do, it describes where the most engaged, highest-spending segment of the market has landed. And that segment has landed almost entirely outside the monopoly.
Tax treatment as a deciding factor
One of the clearest signals in the data concerns tax-free play. Under Finnish law, winnings from EU- and EEA-licensed platforms are exempt from income tax. Veikkaus, operating under a Finnish license, does not offer this benefit. The survey found that 98.5% of respondents primarily used a platform with tax-free status.
The study is careful not to claim that tax treatment alone drives platform choice. But the outcome is unambiguous: nearly every active bettor in this sample ends up on a tax-free platform, whatever their initial motivation. A systematic review in Current Addiction Reports notes a persistent gap in empirical research on how consumers actually behave under different regulatory regimes. Studies like this one start to fill it.
A high-engagement, high-spend audience
The picture that emerges from the frequency and spend data is of an audience that treats sports betting as a regular, deliberate activity rather than an occasional one. 45.35% of respondents bet several times per week. Over 92% spent more than €1,000 on betting in 2025.
These are not passive consumers defaulting to the most visible option. They are active decision-makers who have evaluated their choices and moved to platforms that offer better bonuses, better odds, tax outcomes, or product fit. The European Gaming and Betting Association makes exactly this point in its licensing research: when licensed alternatives exist, consumer behavior becomes “highly sensitive to prices” and platform quality.
What this means beyond Finland
Finland is not unique. It is, in some ways, simply the latest example of a pattern playing out across Europe: monopoly structures designed in the pre-internet era encountering a consumer base that has no practical reason to stay within them.
The policy question whether monopolies or licensing systems better protect public health – remains genuinely contested. As researchers at UW–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and elsewhere have explored, the relationship between market structure and consumer harm is rarely straightforward. Regulatory design, enforcement capacity, and consumer education all play roles that raw market-share data cannot capture.
What this dataset does show, plainly, is that the behavioral argument for monopoly that restricts supply shapes demand, is not holding among Finland’s active betting population.
Finland formally began its transition to a multi-licensing system in 2025, becoming, according to the EGBA, the last EU member state to do so. The Vedonlyontiyhtiot.com study offers a ground-level look at the consumer landscape that transition inherits: a market where the monopoly’s practical authority had already eroded long before the legislation caught up.
Data source: Vedonlyontiyhtiot.com Finnish Sports Betting Study 2025. Survey conducted November–December 2025, n=1,007. Margin of error ±3% at 95% confidence level.