Why Europe's Biggest Gambling Companies Are Getting Bigger

Europe's gambling consolidation story took another major turn on 2 September 2026, when Italy's Lottomatica Group and Spain's CIRSA announced plans for an all-share cross-border combination that would create one of the world's largest publicly traded gambling groups.

Under the proposed transaction, CIRSA will merge into Lottomatica. Existing Lottomatica shareholders are expected to own approximately 67.5% of the combined company, while CIRSA shareholders will hold approximately 32.5%.

Blackstone, CIRSA's largest shareholder, would emerge with approximately 24% of the combined business, making it the largest individual shareholder.

It is what happens when two major gambling businesses combine their technology, data, customers, payments, compliance infrastructure and online operations.

The Lottomatica-CIRSA deal suggests that the next stage of European iGaming competition may increasingly be a battle of ecosystems rather than individual casino brands.

The Lottomatica-CIRSA Deal in Numbers

The companies' investor presentation describes the transaction as creating a "global champion" with approximately €2 billion in pro forma adjusted EBITDA.

The structure currently includes:

The combined company would retain the Lottomatica name, with headquarters and tax residence in Rome and a secondary establishment for CIRSA in Barcelona.

Lottomatica shares would remain listed on Euronext Milan and are expected to be admitted to trading on Spanish stock exchanges following completion.

This would create something increasingly valuable in European gambling: scale across markets, channels and technologies.

Italy and Spain Make an Interesting Combination

Italy and Spain are two of Europe's major gambling economies, but both retain substantial land-based businesses.

European Gaming and Betting Association data show that Italy was Europe's largest gambling market in 2023, with approximately €21 billion in total GGR.

Yet only around 21.7% of Italian gambling revenue was online.

Spain's online share was even lower at approximately 14.2%.

That creates an important strategic opportunity.

These are not digitally saturated markets.

There is potentially considerable room for customers to continue migrating from physical gambling locations toward mobile and online products.

CIRSA itself has historically operated extensive casino, gaming-hall and slot-machine businesses alongside its growing online operations, while Lottomatica combines substantial Italian retail operations with increasingly important online gaming and betting activities.

Together, the companies would therefore have something pure online operators cannot easily replicate:

large physical distribution networks combined with increasingly sophisticated digital businesses.

Europe Is Moving Toward Mobile Gambling

The merger also arrives during a structural transformation of European gambling.

EGBA and H2 Gambling Capital estimated Europe's gambling market at €123.4 billion in GGR in 2024, with online gambling contributing approximately €47.9 billion, or 39%.

By 2029, online GGR is forecast to reach approximately €66.8 billion.

But the device data are even more relevant for CasinoAppReview.

Mobile devices generated an estimated 58% of European online gambling revenue in 2024.

By 2029, that share is forecast to reach 67%.

This means European gambling consolidation is occurring at the same time that the primary casino interface is shifting toward the smartphone.

The strategic question becomes obvious:

What can a €2 billion-EBITDA gambling group build that a smaller operator cannot?

Bigger AI and Personalization Budgets

One answer is data infrastructure.

Modern casino apps increasingly compete through recommendation engines, personalized lobbies, CRM systems, automated customer segmentation and behavioral analysis.

Building these systems properly is expensive.

A larger operator can spread the cost of:

• AI infrastructure;

• data engineering;

• fraud detection;

• recommendation systems;

• CRM technology;

• responsible-gambling monitoring;

• cybersecurity;

• identity verification;

• and analytics

across substantially larger customer and revenue bases.

The merger could therefore create technology economies of scale that go beyond conventional corporate cost-cutting.

Lottomatica says the combination could generate approximately €115 million in annual run-rate cash synergies, including operating-cost and financial-cost savings.

The more interesting long-term question is whether shared technology investment creates additional competitive advantages that are harder to quantify immediately.

One KYC Architecture, Multiple Brands

Compliance provides another reason why European gambling companies may increasingly favor scale.

Every regulated market imposes requirements around areas such as:

KYC [ Know Your Customer], AML [Anti-Money Laundering], age verification, responsible gambling, transaction monitoring, marketing and data protection.

Those requirements are becoming more technologically sophisticated.

A large gambling group does not necessarily need to build completely separate compliance architecture for every brand.

Common components can potentially support multiple products and jurisdictions while still applying market-specific regulatory rules.

That can lower marginal compliance costs.

It can also make expansion easier.

For smaller operators, meanwhile, the cost of keeping up with regulatory technology may become progressively harder to absorb.

Payments Could Become a Competitive Advantage

Payments represent another important scale economy.

Casino players increasingly judge platforms by withdrawal speed and payment convenience.

Large operators processing substantial transaction volumes can potentially negotiate better commercial relationships with payment processors and invest more heavily in:

• payment orchestration;

• fraud detection;

• instant withdrawals;

• open banking;

• wallet integrations;

• transaction monitoring;

• and local payment methods.

This matters because payments are no longer merely back-office infrastructure.

They are part of casino UX.

A beautiful mobile casino that takes several days to process withdrawals is still a poor digital product.

Shared Technology Does Not Necessarily Mean One Casino App

Consolidation does not necessarily mean Lottomatica and CIRSA will suddenly replace every consumer-facing platform with one identical app.

That would often make little commercial sense.

Local gambling brands have different customer bases, regulatory permissions and market positions.

The more plausible direction is shared infrastructure beneath differentiated brands.

Think of the architecture as:

Different brands → shared technology layer → common data/compliance/payment infrastructure

Players may therefore continue seeing multiple casino and betting brands while much more of the underlying technology becomes centralized.

This is why measuring consolidation simply by counting casino brands can be misleading.

Europe could still have many consumer-facing gambling brands while the technology underneath them becomes controlled by fewer large groups.

The Casino Market Is Already Becoming More Concentrated

CIRSA's own prospectus highlights how far consolidation has already progressed in some gambling segments.

In Italy's land-based machine market, approximately 81% of the AWP [Amusement with Prizes] market and 91% of the VLT [Video Lottery Terminal] market were controlled by the five largest operators in 2023.

The proposed combination therefore fits a much broader economic pattern.

Regulation is becoming more complex.

Technology is becoming more expensive.

Customer acquisition remains competitive.

Responsible-gambling obligations are increasing.

Cybersecurity requires constant investment.

All of these pressures reward companies capable of spreading fixed costs across millions of transactions and customers.

SWOT Analysis: What the Merger Could Mean for European iGaming

Strengths

The combined business would gain considerable financial scale, strong positions in Italy and Spain, and a diversified mix of online and physical gambling.

Shared investment could improve mobile technology, payments, data infrastructure and compliance.

Weaknesses

Large organizations can become slower.

Combining systems, databases, corporate cultures and technology stacks is complicated. Poor integration could erase some expected efficiencies.

Opportunities

Online gambling represents perhaps the most important opportunity.

Italy and Spain still have significantly lower online penetration than highly digital markets such as Sweden.

Mobile migration therefore provides a long runway for growth.

Threats

Competition regulators will examine major consolidation carefully.

Large operators also face increasing political scrutiny around gambling harm, advertising and affordability.

Concentrating customer data inside larger ecosystems additionally raises cybersecurity and privacy risks.

Responsible Gambling Could Also Benefit From Scale

Technology consolidation should not only be analyzed through profitability.

EGBA reported that its member companies sent more than 67 million safer-gambling messages to customers in 2024, while 21 million customers - approximately 65% - used at least one safety tool.

Large operators have the resources to build behavioral-risk systems capable of identifying potentially problematic patterns across enormous datasets.

AI can potentially detect changes in deposit frequency, session duration, or gambling intensity earlier than manual monitoring.

However, consolidation also creates responsibility.

A company with better behavioral data cannot reasonably argue that it knows less about customer risk.

The larger and more sophisticated gambling platforms become, the stronger the expectation should be that their player-protection technology develops at the same pace as their commercial personalization systems.

What Guglielmo Angelozzi Says About Online Growth

Lottomatica CEO Guglielmo Angelozzi explicitly identified digital expansion as part of the logic behind the combination.

Commenting on the transaction, Angelozzi said it would expand development opportunities “particularly in the online business segment.”

That short statement may ultimately prove more important than the ownership percentages.

The merger is not simply about putting Italian and Spanish gambling assets under one corporate roof.

It is about creating sufficient scale to compete as gambling becomes progressively more digital.

2027 Forecast: The Rise of the European Gambling Platform

Our expectation is that European gambling consolidation will continue through 2027 and beyond.

The economics increasingly favor groups capable of operating shared infrastructure across multiple brands and jurisdictions.

For CasinoAppReview, five areas deserve particular attention:

Technology: larger groups can afford more sophisticated app and platform development.

AI: bigger datasets make personalization and behavioral analytics more valuable.

Payments: transaction scale improves the economics of payment infrastructure.

Compliance: common RegTech systems can support multiple licensed businesses.

Game aggregation: larger operators can potentially negotiate from a stronger position with suppliers and studios.

The result could be a European casino market with many visible brands but a much smaller number of underlying technology ecosystems.

Conclusion: The Real Merger May Happen Behind the Apps

The proposed Lottomatica-CIRSA combination is significant because of its size.

Approximately €2 billion in pro forma adjusted EBITDA and leadership positions across major regulated markets would make the combined company a formidable European gambling business.

But the more interesting transformation may happen where players cannot see it.

Payment systems.

KYC infrastructure.

Game aggregation.

Customer databases.

AI models.

Responsible-gambling technology.

Fraud detection.

Mobile development.

These increasingly determine whether a modern casino app succeeds.

Europe's gambling industry is therefore entering a phase where scale itself can become a technology strategy.

The Lottomatica-CIRSA combination may preserve multiple brands and local customer experiences.

Underneath those brands, however, Europe's gambling infrastructure is becoming increasingly concentrated.

For casino-app users, that creates a paradox worth watching in 2027:

There may still be hundreds of gambling apps to choose from - but increasingly fewer companies building the technology behind them.

References / Works Cited

CIRSA Enterprises, S.A. (2025). Annual report 2024. CIRSA.

CIRSA Enterprises, S.A. (2025). Prospectus. Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores.

CIRSA Enterprises, S.A., & Lottomatica Group S.p.A. (2026, September 2). Creating a global champion: Proposed combination investor presentation. Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores.

Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego. (2025). Quarterly report on the evolution of the online gambling market. Government of Spain.

European Gaming and Betting Association. (2025). European gambling market: Key figures 2025 edition. EGBA & H2 Gambling Capital.

European Gaming and Betting Association. (2025). Annual activity report 2025. EGBA.

European Gaming and Betting Association. (2026). Annual activity report 2026. EGBA.

Reuters. (2026, September 2). Italy's Lottomatica to take over Spain's CIRSA to create combined betting company. Reuters.