When sports betting is legal

The draft focuses mainly on the content of international football betting with many changes. Despite the 8-year gap as well as the complicated developments in the scale and form of illegal sports betting, the new draft decree is considered to continue to "tighten" rather than "loosen" the implementation of international football betting.

From allowing a maximum bet of 1 million VND/1 betting product in 1 day and a maximum of 15 betting products, the new draft decree stipulates that participants are only allowed to bet a maximum of 10 million VND/day for all betting products. In addition, there is only one licensed betting provider with a 5-year pilot period, accompanied by a series of other conditions on legal capital, international cooperation capacity, commitment to protect image copyright for tournament partners... Basically, this is a new move to gradually bring international football betting activities as well as other types of sports into legal business. The draft also includes adjustments to increase the feasibility of betting business activities, for example, instead of only organizing bets on matches in the official system of the International Football Federation (FIFA) which are not held regularly, participants will now be extended to tournaments that are FIFA member federations (understood as football tournaments in Europe), or allowing online betting on late-time matches...

However, analysts say that the bottlenecks that have prevented international football betting from being implemented for so long have not been "opened" in the new draft decree, which is not transparent and difficult to attract investors. The reason is that many contents of the draft decree regulating betting are not attractive enough to attract players; businesses also find it difficult to solve the problem of profit, especially in the relatively 5-year pilot period.

In addition, for reasons of security, order and social safety, the draft decree designed a strict legal corridor, which is not suitable for the characteristics and current experiences of sports betting. In fact, players in Vietnam are being approached very deeply by organizations and betting websites operating illegally in Vietnam. There can be hundreds of betting products for each match, thousands of matches per week, dozens of types of sports, not just football, not to mention the unlimited amount of bets or participating accounts.

Even people who do not intend to bet are influenced by the Vietnamese advertisements that appear openly on live television at top tournaments. In other words, legal betting businesses in Vietnam will not be able to compete. In the case of only one licensed business, it will unintentionally lead to the opposite effect: illegal organizations will take advantage of the legal betting to attract more players to their side.

The slow implementation in the spirit of careful assessment of the sensitive type of sports betting, which has a great impact on social security, is understandable for the management agency. However, the reality is that we have had enough time to analyze all risks, have tools to control cash flow through technology platforms and experience in preventing crimes in the digital space. Those advances in management aspects are not mentioned in the provisions of the draft decree, making the seemingly "open" proposals become new "barriers" in the implementation of international football betting business in particular and sports in general.

YEN PHUONG

Source: https://www.sggp.org.vn/khi-dat-cuoc-the-thao-hop-phap-post814973.html