“Gambling in Italy has grown by 72% in ten years and the current trajectory will lead us to exceed, between 2028 and 2029, the threshold of 200 billion euros played.” The alarm comes from the study “Not so small. Gambling, an additional problem for small Italian municipalities,” promoted by Fondazione Isscon (Institute for Consumer Studies), Federconsumatori and Cgil (Italian General Confederation of Labour). Now in its third edition, the 2026 report systematically observes the extent of gambling in Italian municipalities with populations between 2,000 and 10,000 inhabitants.
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The survey involves a total of 3,146 towns, that is 40% of Italian municipalities, where almost a quarter of the population lives. Here, in 2025, “34.7 billion euros were played between physical and online gambling, with 4.6 billion euros in losses.” Furthermore, in 113 small municipalities, online gambling per capita exceeds “at least twice the national average.”
It is especially online gambling that worries, a business that last year recorded a 9.5% growth in twelve months and generated earnings of over 100 billion euros, out of a total of 165.34 billion.
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The study also highlights how in some municipalities there are “variations of tens of millions of euros from one year to another, with volumes that appear or disappear suddenly.”
The gambling map
Although the geography of the phenomenon is “changeable and difficult to explain,” as it requires controls and transparency, it involves the whole of Italy. “And it shows that we are not facing a problem only of large cities, nor a phenomenon confined to economically more fragile or richer areas.”
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