How Spelinspektionen Supervises Sweden’s Gambling Market

From banned yellow-card bets to a SEK 44 million penalty for bet365, this is how Sweden’s gambling regulator decides who can take your bets, what you can bet on, and what happens when bookmakers break the rules.

Every time a fan in Stockholm or Malmö bets on Allsvenskan, the Premier League or the Champions League, one authority is working in the background: Spelinspektionen, the Swedish Gambling Authority. It decides which companies may offer betting, which markets they are allowed to sell, and how they must protect the people who use them.

Sweden is a useful case study for football fans everywhere. The country moved from a state monopoly to an open licensing system in 2019, and it now has some of Europe’s strictest anti-match-fixing rules. This guide explains what the regulator is, how its supervision works, how it punishes operators, what it means for football betting, and where the system is struggling.

What is Spelinspektionen?

Spelinspektionen is a Swedish government agency based in Strängnäs, west of Stockholm. Before the reform it was called Lotteriinspektionen. When the Gambling Act (2018:1138) came into force on 1 January 2019, the agency became responsible for licensing and supervising the whole Swedish gambling market, both online and land-based.

Its leadership changed in 2026. Camilla Rosenberg, who led the authority through the 2019 reform, left in late 2025, and chief legal officer Johan Röhr took over as acting director general. The government then appointed Peter Knutsson, previously Sweden’s Advertising Ombudsman, for a six-year term. He started on 17 August 2026 and will serve until 31 August 2032.

The licence system: who is allowed to take bets

The basic rule is simple. Only companies with a Swedish licence may legally offer gambling to the Swedish market. The Gambling Act has separate licence types for commercial online gambling, betting, land-based commercial gambling and gambling for public-benefit causes, plus a software licence for game suppliers. A licence can last for a maximum of five years.

Since July 2023, B2B companies that make or supply games have needed their own licence, and licensed operators may only use games from licensed suppliers. This gives the regulator a second line of control. Suppliers such as Yggdrasil and Quickspin have been fined for providing content to unlicensed sites, with Quickspin’s penalty reaching SEK 650,000.

Licensed operators pay a 22% tax on gross gaming revenue, up from 18% since 1 July 2024. They also pay supervision fees, which were reset under new regulations (SIFS 2026:1) from 1 March 2026. In 2025, licensed operators reported combined net turnover of SEK 28.2 billion, and SEK 7.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

How supervision works in practice

Supervision means checking that licence holders keep following the law after they receive a licence. Spelinspektionen opens investigations into specific areas, requests documents, reviews real customer cases and tests websites. It then decides whether a breach has happened. Some investigations close with no further action, while others lead to sanctions.

Duty of care

The most important area is the duty of care. Operators must monitor how customers play and act when gambling becomes excessive. Every player must set daily, weekly and monthly deposit limits, and a bonus may only be offered the first time a customer plays with an operator. Marketing must be moderate and must never target under-18s or self-excluded players.

Spelpaus, the national self-exclusion register

Spelinspektionen also runs Spelpaus, the national self-exclusion register launched in 2019. A player logs in with BankID and blocks themselves from every licensed operator at once, either for a set period or until further notice. By spring 2026, more than 137,000 people were registered. A new directive in force from 1 August 2026 tightens how operators must check players against the register.

Money laundering and unlicensed sites

The authority also checks anti-money laundering controls. In June 2025, for example, Betsson Nordic, Flutter-owned TSG Interactive and Snabbare received AML fines of between SEK 5.5 million and SEK 7 million. At the same time, Spelinspektionen regularly bans unlicensed companies from targeting Swedish players, and since 2023 payment providers have had to share certain information with it.

Sanctions: warnings, fines and licence revocation

When a breach is confirmed, the regulator can issue a remark or a warning, order the company to correct the problem, add a sanction fee, or revoke the licence. A sanction fee cannot exceed 10% of the operator’s annual turnover. Companies can appeal to the Administrative Court in Linköping and then the Administrative Court of Appeal in Jönköping, and courts often change the amounts.

The bet365 case shows the whole process. In 2023, Spelinspektionen set penalties totalling SEK 79 million against Hillside, the company behind bet365 in Sweden, over duty-of-care and deposit-limit failures between 2019 and 2022. One customer made 44 deposits and 36 withdrawals in about six weeks, losing SEK 287,623, without any deposit limit in place.

bet365’s system had a hidden technical ceiling of SEK 500 million, which the regulator said was not a real limit. The courts reduced the total to SEK 44 million, SEK 40 million for sports betting and SEK 4 million for casino, and in October 2026 the appeal court upheld the warnings and fines. bet365 was punished but kept its Swedish licences.

Not every case goes the regulator’s way. In 2024 it fined state-owned Svenska Spel Sport & Casino SEK 100 million over how it handled ten customers showing signs of harmful gambling. In June 2025 the Administrative Court in Linköping cancelled the fine, and Spelinspektionen appealed. Separately, a SEK 100 million bonus-rule fine against Kindred’s Spooniker was cut to SEK 30 million on appeal.

Licence revocation is the strongest tool. On 1 October 2026, Spelinspektionen temporarily revoked Charm Entertainment’s licence for land-based casino gaming and ordered it to stop operating immediately. The decision followed an investigation into the company’s annual reports and material from a criminal case. It applies until a final ruling, or 1 April 2027 at the latest.

Why football fans should care: the match-fixing rules

Football is where Spelinspektionen’s work is most visible to fans. Since 1 January 2021, licensed bookmakers in Sweden have followed special rules designed to reduce match-fixing. The regulator called football a high-risk sport and argued that lower divisions are especially exposed, because monitoring is weaker and many players earn little or nothing from the game.

Under these rules, operators cannot offer bets on rule violations such as yellow cards, red cards and penalties. Betting on Swedish football is limited to the top four levels: Allsvenskan, Superettan, Division 1 Norra and Södra, and the six regional Division 2 leagues. The same top-four principle applies to foreign leagues, and bets on the individual performance of players under 18 are banned.

Operators must also report suspected match-fixing to the regulator every year. The rules are enforced: bet365 received a warning and a SEK 1 million fine for offering odds on a Swedish match involving players under 18. Opinions remain divided. Industry body BOS argued that restrictions push bettors to unlicensed sites where suspicious patterns are harder to detect, while Svenska Spel said the rules did not go far enough.

The biggest challenge: keeping players in the licensed market

Spelinspektionen’s success is often measured by the channelisation rate, the share of gambling that takes place with licensed companies. The target, set when the market opened in 2019, is 90%. In 2025 the rate fell to 84%, down from 85% in 2024 and 86% in 2023. The regulator says the true figure lies between 78% and 89%, depending on the method used.

The numbers look very different by product. Sports betting reached 96% channelisation in 2025, while online casino stood at just 81%. In other words, most football betting already happens on licensed sites, and the main leak is casino games. The regulator’s own research found that the most common reason for using illegal sites is being, or having been, self-excluded through Spelpaus.

The authority has also faced official criticism. In 2024, the Swedish National Audit Office concluded that its supervision was not effective enough to meet the expectations of parliament and government. The audit pointed to too few inspections, weak follow-up, and an unclear Gambling Act that allowed a grey market of operators to reach Swedish players.

What changes next

The biggest legal change is still being prepared. Today, the law only covers foreign websites that target Sweden, for example by using the Swedish language or currency. A 2025 government inquiry (Ds 2025:23) proposed replacing this directional criterion with a participant criterion, meaning any site people in Sweden can play on would need a licence. It suggested 1 January 2027, but no bill had reached parliament by October 2026.

Other measures have already arrived. An expanded ban on gambling with borrowed money, including credit cards, came into force in spring 2026, and Spelpaus checks are becoming stricter. With a new director general from a consumer-protection background, the direction is clear: fewer gaps for unlicensed operators and closer scrutiny of licensed ones.

The bottom line

For football fans, Spelinspektionen explains why a Swedish betting site will not let you bet on a yellow card or a fifth-tier match, why bonuses are limited to a single welcome offer, and why one login can block every licensed bookmaker at once. Its record is mixed, with court defeats and a missed channelisation target, but few European regulators shape football betting so directly.