Italy has the strictest gambling advertising rules in Europe and has just rebuilt its licensing system from the ground up. Between those two facts sits a market that looks nothing like Britain’s: no sponsorship, no bonus advertising, no brand you will have seen on a shirt, and a concession system that has cut the number of operators by three quarters.
Who regulates, and what a concession is
The regulator is ADM, the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli, formerly AAMS — you will still see the old name on older pages and on some operators’ own footers. Italy does not issue licences in the British sense; it awards concessions, a state grant to operate a defined set of games for a fixed term.
The reform, under Legislative Decree 41/2024, took effect on 13 November 2025. The numbers tell the story: the old system had been running on extensions with 208 concessions; the new one awarded 52 concessions to 46 operators, each costing €7m as a one-off fee, running up to nine years with no automatic renewal.
The conditions attached are as significant as the price. A concessionaire needs at least €3m of revenue over the previous two financial years, servers inside the European Economic Area, transparent ownership and financial guarantees — and it must operate through a single national domain, which eliminated roughly 350 commercial skins that had been running under those 208 concessions. If you ever wondered why Italian betting brands multiplied and then vanished, that is the mechanism.
The advertising ban
Since 1 January 2019, under the decreto Dignità, gambling advertising and sponsorship are banned outright in Italy. Not restricted by watershed, not limited to certain channels — banned, including shirt sponsorship and stadium naming. It is the reason Serie A shirts carry no betting brands while the Premier League has spent a decade arguing about them.
For a comparison site the effect is direct: an Italian operator cannot advertise a welcome bonus to you at all, so the bonus arms race that shapes the British market simply does not exist there. Spain restricted offers to new accounts; Italy removed the advertising of them entirely. Britain regulates how they must be described. Three neighbours, three answers, and the one thing they agree on is that the headline figure was the problem.
What a concession actually protects
ADM requires segregated player funds, enforced deposit limits, a national self-exclusion register and full anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer procedures. On the sportsbook itself there is one rule British bettors find surprising: Italy works from a positive list of authorised events. An operator may only offer markets on what ADM has authorised, which is mostly sport but includes some non-sporting events — the Sanremo festival, for instance, is a legal betting market in Italy, while elections and financial indices are not.
Winnings are taxed at source rather than in your hands, so an Italian bettor receives the net amount and declares nothing. Britain charges nothing on winnings either, but for the opposite reason: the levy sits entirely on the operator.
If you are betting from Britain
An ADM concession gives an operator no standing with you. Britain regulates at the point of consumption under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014: a UK Gambling Commission licence is needed to take bets from customers in Great Britain or to advertise to them, whatever the operator holds elsewhere. We therefore do not link sign-ups on this page.
Be careful with one specific claim you will meet elsewhere. Several operators marketed to British readers as “ADM licensed” hold nothing of the kind — a Curaçao sub-licence is not an ADM concession, and after the 2025 reform the list of who genuinely holds one is short and public. If a site tells you it is ADM-licensed, that is checkable, and worth checking.
If you are betting from Italy
Look for the ADM concession number on the operator’s single national domain, and treat any gambling advertising you see as a sign that whoever placed it is not a concessionaire — because a concessionaire is not allowed to place it. Deposit limits are set in the account and self-exclusion runs centrally through ADM, covering every concessionaire at once.
Related
What a British licence guarantees is in UK bookmakers, and the accounts we review are compared in online bookmakers. For the neighbouring regulated markets see Spanish bookmakers, French bookmakers, German bookmakers and European bookmakers; how a Maltese licence differs from a national one is in Maltese bookmakers.
18+ · Gambling should be treated as paid entertainment, never as income.