The Director of the Danish gambling regulator and Chair of the Gambling Regulators’ European Forum assesses recent changes in the country’s framework in an exclusive interview with Focus Gaming News.
Exclusive interview.- Gambling regulation in Denmark is going through a period of intense change. New supplier licences have come into effect over the past year, and the government is now working on legislation that will introduce new advertising restrictions while expanding regulated game types.
As 2025 comes to a close, Anders Dorph, director of the Danish gambling regulator Spillemyndigheden, or and chair of the Gambling Regulators’ European Forum (GREF) gave Focus Gaming News an exclusive interview to assess these changes and outline the regulator’s priorities for 2026.
What were the most significant developments in gambling regulation in Denmark in 2025?
The Danish Parliament has recently entered into a comprehensive political agreement on gambling. The aim with the agreement is to combat problem gambling and protect children and young people. This includes a whistle-to-whistle marketing ban targeting both broadcasted sports events and marketing near schools.
The agreement also calls for explicit regulation on SoMe and influencers promoting gambling. It also includes new measures to combat the illegal market, e.g. the legal basis for blocking sites promoting illegal gambling online and we will allow more game types to be offered on the market. Last, the agreement calls for a clean-up of regulation that is no longer fit for purpose.
How is the Danish Gambling Authority working with operators to ensure the regulated market remains competitive?
As part of the new political agreement, we will allow more game types to be offered in the market e.g., dice games. This initiative is directly related to our collaboration with the industry and our objective to combat the illegal market. We are always interested in hearing from the industry, and I believe that this enables us to advise politicians better.
What’s been the impact of the new supplier licences in Denmark?
When an operator offers a game this is in most cases executed from the suppliers’ technical setup. When many operators use the same suppliers, it makes sense to be able to go directly to the supplier to resolve issues that affect multiple operators.
Without supplier licences, we would have to approach perhaps five to six operators with the same problem. Now we are able to resolve issues by contacting the supplier. The supplier licences have led to a closer dialogue with the supplier industry which ensures better compliance.
How is data helping to combat matchfixing?
Data has proved to be the key to detect match-fixing. Consequently, we have changed the requirements for operators to report data that is relevant. The change in the data reporting requirement has instantly proved to be an improvement, as it gives us the opportunity to investigate cases directly across license holders without manually requesting data from them.
Looking forward, we aim to have a more proactive approach. There are a number of challenges we are working on solving, first of all there are some technical issues. Our data team are currently trying to improve our ability to process the data in a more efficient way by building structures in our databases.
Secondly, the data reporting requirements have been set up to put the least possible burden on the operators. This priority has meant that we need to process the data after receiving it to harmonise it across the operators so that we can use a unified set of data in our work to combat match-fixing.
Long term, we also strive to build a system that will be able to detect abnormalities in the data and automatically generate reports based on the alerts we have received from partners. Thus, it is a complex task and something we will need to work with continuously.
Match-fixing is a global challenge. Match fixers can be located in one or several parts of the world, targeting sports events in another part of the world and the misused gambling operators can be established all over the world. It is obvious that international cooperation is absolutely crucial.
We have a well-organised national platform in Denmark, which the Danish Gambling Authority is chairing. We also highly prioritise the work in Group of Copenhagen, which is the operational cooperation between national platforms.
What are your priorities for 2026?
Our principal policy priorities will always be player protection and combatting the illegal market, and that is also what I see as big challenges in Europe. Combatting match-fixing is also a big problem that needs to have much focus going forward.
“Our principal policy priorities will always be player protection and combatting the illegal market.”
Anders Dorph, director of the Spillemyndigheden and chair of the GREF.
As I mentioned earlier, the Danish Parliament has recently entered into a comprehensive political agreement on gambling, and this agreement will be transformed into concrete legislation which the Danish Gambling Authority must implement as effectively as possible. So this will be our main focus in regards to policy next year.
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