Greece Cracks Down on Gambling Advertising to Protect Minors

Greece is pushing back against the spread of gambling advertising after a national advisory body raised formal concerns about how betting content reaches young people. The Hellenic National Committee on Bioethics and Technoethics has published a report calling on regulators and lawmakers to tighten oversight of Greece gambling advertising and reduce the exposure of minors to betting promotions across both digital and broadcast platforms.

A Changing Landscape for Gambling Exposure

The committee’s concerns centre on how the growth of online gambling has reshaped the environment young people navigate daily. Betting operators have moved heavily into digital channels over recent years, with mobile apps and browser-based platforms becoming the primary way most players engage with gambling services. For adults, that shift has made licensed betting more convenient. For policymakers, it has created new challenges around where gambling content appears and who sees it.

The report argues that teenagers now encounter betting material not through dedicated gambling spaces but through the platforms they already use for entertainment. Video streaming, social media, multiplayer gaming, and sports content all share the same devices and apps. Within those spaces, gambling brands appear through advertising placements, event sponsorships, and commercial partnerships tied to professional sport.

Sports Broadcasting and the Visibility of Betting Brands

Sports television has become one of the most visible channels for Greece gambling advertising. Betting brands sponsor professional clubs and leagues, and their promotions run during live match coverage. This makes gambling content a regular part of the sports viewing experience, not just for adult fans but for younger audiences who follow the same teams.

The committee notes that the problem extends beyond traditional broadcast. Online video platforms and social networks carry sports highlights and commentary to large audiences, including teenagers, and gambling advertisements often appear alongside that content. Because this distribution happens across open platforms, controlling when and where those ads appear is far more difficult than in a scheduled broadcast environment.

Rising Treatment Numbers Among Young Adults

The report points to data from the National Organisation for the Prevention and Treatment of Addictions showing a significant rise in young adults seeking help for gambling-related problems. Between 2022 and 2025, the number of people aged 18 to 25 requesting treatment grew several times over. While those figures cover adults who have already reached the legal age, researchers treat them as relevant to the broader question of when problematic relationships with gambling begin.

Greece already sets the legal gambling age at 21, one of the highest thresholds in Europe. But the committee argues that strict age limits alone are not enough when Greece gambling advertising reaches minors indirectly through sport, digital media, and unlicensed platforms that do not apply the same verification standards as regulated operators.

The report also references international studies placing Greece among the higher-ranking European countries for gambling participation rates among 16-year-olds. That figure sits in the background of the committee’s recommendations and adds weight to the argument that existing protections are not fully working in practice.

What the Committee Is Recommending

The advisory body has put forward several concrete proposals. On advertising, it suggests regulators review broadcast schedules and digital distribution patterns to identify periods when teenage audiences are most likely to be watching sports programming. Adjusting the timing and frequency of gambling ads during those windows would reduce direct exposure without requiring a full ban.

It also recommends that the Hellenic Gaming Commission coordinate a broader industry framework with licensed operators to set clearer standards for how Greece gambling advertising appears in sports and entertainment media. This would mean closer collaboration between the regulator and the industry rather than enforcement alone.

Verification is another area the committee wants to strengthen. It proposes linking online betting account registration to Greece’s national secure identification system, making it harder for underage users to create accounts using incomplete or inaccurate personal data. The report also encourages the Ministry of Finance to look at restricting anonymous prepaid payment cards, which can sometimes be used to fund gambling accounts without full identity checks.

Timing and Political Context

These recommendations land at a politically relevant moment. Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis has separately presented draft legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal gambling operators active in Greece. The two processes are running in parallel rather than as a single coordinated reform, but the committee’s report adds pressure for a wider regulatory conversation that goes beyond enforcement against unlicensed sites.

The core challenge the committee has identified is not unique to Greece. Across Europe, regulators are grappling with the same tension between a gambling industry that funds itself partly through sports media partnerships and public health concerns about how young people absorb that commercial presence. What makes the Greek situation distinct is the combination of a 21-year age threshold that is already higher than most EU neighbours, rising youth treatment numbers, and now formal institutional pressure to go further.

How the Hellenic Gaming Commission and the government respond to these recommendations will be worth watching. Advertising reform in gambling tends to move slowly, but when ethics bodies, treatment data, and draft legislation all point in the same direction at the same time, the pressure to act becomes harder to ignore.