Three French casino groups have changed hands since the start of 2025, and every buyer runs online or machine gaming somewhere else in Europe. Over the same period FDJ United has put the online business it paid €2.45 billion for under strategic review. All of this is happening in a market where online casino is still illegal and no bill to change that is in front of parliament.
The Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) put French gross gaming revenue (PBJ) at €14.1 billion in 2025, up 3.0% on 2024. That is a market growing at roughly the pace of Italy and the United Kingdom, with one segment missing from the licensed perimeter that in most comparable European markets is the largest online vertical.
What the regulator actually measures
Online gambling produced €2,617 million of PBJ in 2025, 18.5% of the total, and grew 8.5%. Online sports betting was €1,766 million, up 10.4%. Online poker reached €525 million, up 6.5%. Online horse racing was €326 million, up 2.4%. The ANJ counted 4.2 million unique online players, up 7.7%, across 6.1 million active accounts.
Retail still carries the market. FDJ’s lottery and retail sports betting delivered €6,950 million, up 2.8%. Land-based casinos generated €2,816 million, up 3.4%, on 31.6 million entries. The PMU’s retail horse racing business fell 2.8% to €1,651 million, and Paris gaming clubs dropped 21% to €97 million.
France licenses online sports betting, online poker and online horse racing. It does not license online casino. That single exclusion is what makes the past 18 months of deal activity legible.
FDJ United bought big, then started reconsidering
The anchor transaction remains FDJ’s €2.45 billion takeover of Kindred Group, completed in October 2024 and followed by the rebrand to FDJ United. The deal brought in Unibet, 32Red and Relax Gaming, the supplier Kindred had moved to 93% ownership in October 2021, paying around €80 million in cash for the remaining 66.6% of shares plus earn-outs of up to €113 million, against an equity value of €295 million for the business. It gave the former French monopoly a licensed online presence across the UK, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Italy.
Two years on, the company has opened the question of whether it wants all of it. In its H1 2026 results published on 30 July 2026, FDJ United announced a market review of its online betting and gaming unit, language that covers divestments and market exits, alongside a possible sale of non-core payment services assets.
The half-year numbers explain the pressure. Group PBJ was €4,314 million, down 1.3%, and revenue was €1,782 million, down 4.5%. Recurring EBITDA was €404 million at a 22.7% margin, and adjusted net profit was €180 million. Online betting and gaming PBJ was stable at €702 million. Gaming tax increases across France, Romania, the UK and the Netherlands cost the group around €52 million over the half.
“The Group’s performance in the first half is still affected by higher taxation, alongside factors inherent to the lottery business and the impact of exceptional heatwaves which have weighed on traffic at points of sale in France.”
Stéphane Pallez, chief executive, FDJ United
The French part of that is set out in the social security code. From 1 July 2025 the social levy on online sports betting rose to 15% of gross gaming revenue under article L137-21, up from 10.6%, an increase of 4.4 percentage points. Retail sports betting is levied at 7.6%. Online poker moved to 10% under article L137-22. Online horse race betting stayed at 6.9%, the rate in force since January 2022. Stacked on the state gambling levies, the change takes the total burden on French online sports betting from around 55% of gross gaming revenue to roughly 59%.
Three casino groups, three foreign buyers
While the largest domestic operator reconsiders its online footprint, foreign buyers have been taking French land-based assets off the market.
Novomatic opened the sequence on 1 July 2025 with Vikings Casinos, a group founded in Falaise in 1998 that runs more than 10 casinos and around 1,000 gaming terminals and employs over 300 people. Terms were not disclosed.
Banijay Gaming, the owner of Betclic, signed an agreement on 6 July 2026 to acquire 100% of Groupe JOA from Blackstone and Kings Park Capital. JOA runs 33 casinos, generated €430 million in gross revenue in 2025 and reports 4.6 million annual customers. Completion is expected in the second half of 2026, subject to merger control, casino gaming approvals and employee consultation. Banijay had bought German sportsbook Tipico three months earlier.
The most recent came on 28 August 2026, when Merkur agreed to buy 95% of Casigrangi, the holding company that owns 81.21% of listed operator Société Française de Casinos, in a transaction reported at around €31.5 million. The sellers are GPG Groupe Philippe Ginestet and DOFA, which keeps 5% of Casigrangi under put and call provisions. The offer values SFC at €6.19 per share, a 196% premium to the 240-day volume-weighted average. The perimeter is seven casinos: Megève, Granville and Mimizan under Casigrangi’s Le Stelsia group, and Châtel-Guyon, Collioure, Gruissan and Port-la-Nouvelle under SFC, together producing €22.5 million of gross gaming revenue and €3.5 million of EBITDA. Completion is scheduled for Q1 2027, with a mandatory tender offer to be filed with the Autorité des Marchés Financiers in the first half of that year and Ministry of the Interior approval required under Article L. 323-3.
What the buyers are buying
Read individually, these are small transactions. JOA aside, the disclosed values are modest, and French casino EBITDA margins are thin once gaming levies and municipal revenue-sharing agreements are applied. Read together, they show a consistent profile: acquirers with online casino or machine gaming operations in other European jurisdictions taking positions in the one large European market that has not licensed the vertical.
Two things follow from the deals themselves. The first is distribution. A French casino licence carries physical venues, local political relationships and a customer database in a country of 68 million people. If online casino is licensed, priority or preference for existing land-based licence holders is one of the models under discussion, and ownership of a casino group is the cheapest way to be eligible for it.
The second is the composition of the opposition. The French casino industry, represented by Casinos de France and backed by mayors of casino towns, is the reason the 2024 legalisation attempt was withdrawn. Its argument rests on employment and municipal finance: around 60,000 jobs, and in some communes up to 50% of the municipal budget. That argument does not change when ownership changes. Who makes it does. Banijay Gaming already operates Betclic. Novomatic and Merkur both run online casino and machine gaming businesses across Europe. As a larger share of French casino capacity moves into groups that would apply for an online casino licence, the sector’s position becomes harder to hold as a unified veto.
The legalisation file has not moved since 2024
The last serious attempt was amendment I-3638 to the 2025 finance bill, tabled by the government on 19 October 2024. It would have licensed online casino at a 27.8% state levy on gross gaming revenue, matched by a 27.8% social security levy in the accompanying social security financing bill, for a combined 55.6%. The amendment was withdrawn.
Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin then opened a structured consultation on 6 November 2024, run with the ANJ and bringing together around 50 representatives of online and land-based operators, public health bodies, parliamentarians and local elected officials across three working groups: addiction prevention, individual protection and public order, and economic impact on the sector and casino towns. Findings were due in Q1 2025. The process stopped when the Barnier government fell the following month and has not restarted with a published timetable.
The regulator has been consistent about where the decision sits.
“The role of the authority is to inform parliament if the discussion ever comes up. This legalisation could only happen following the discussion by the legislature.”
Pascal Chevremont, chair, ANJ
Why 2027 is the date that matters
The 2027 budget is a poor vehicle. The parliamentary window for the PLF 2027 is compressed to roughly five weeks against fourteen for the previous budget, and the session ends on 28 February 2027 ahead of the presidential election. Governments do not usually spend a short session on a measure that produced 130 mayoral signatures against it the last time it appeared.
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That points to the file reopening after the election rather than before it, with most observers placing licensing somewhere between 2027 and 2029. For operators, the practical question is what the framework costs. The 55.6% combined rate in the withdrawn amendment would have put online casino close to what French online sports betting now carries after the July 2025 increase, and well above the rates in Italy, Spain or the Netherlands. A licensed French online casino market on those terms would be large but structurally low-margin, which is a different investment case from the one implied by market-size estimates alone.
Meanwhile the ownership map keeps changing. The JOA transaction is due to close in the second half of 2026, and the Merkur tender offer runs through the first half of 2027. By the time a French government has the parliamentary room to legislate, most of the sector that blocked it will answer to boards in Austria, Germany and France, all of which run online casino somewhere else. The economics of French land-based casinos have not improved, and the same pressure on European operator valuations that pushed Entain into the FTSE 250 makes the next French deal more likely, not less.
Source: Autorité Nationale des Jeux
