The 2026 World Cup is the biggest betting event of the year, and the Dutch regulator has spent the run-up sending bookmakers a blunt message: stay inside the rules or face immediate enforcement. Behind the tournament-season crackdown sits a larger question that will outlast the football, a coalition government proposal to ban online gambling advertising outright.
The warning letters
Ahead of the tournament, the KSA wrote to every licensed operator restating the rules and signalling it would act fast on breaches. The reminders covered familiar ground that operators sometimes test at the edges: untargeted advertising and sports sponsorship remain banned under the Orka decree, and role models, celebrities, influencers and athletes, can't appear in gambling ads.
The letters also flagged a betting-markets point that catches newcomers out. Not every wager legal elsewhere is legal here. Dutch rules prohibit betting on isolated micro-events such as who gets the first corner or a yellow card, markets that invite manipulation and carry match-fixing risk. The KSA showed it means this in practice when it recently challenged Holland Casino Online and VBET over offering banned bets on own goals.
No live nudges during the match
A follow-up letter narrowed in on live advertising. The principle is straightforward: an operator may not push a viewer to place a bet on the match they're currently watching. That covers social-media posts, push notifications and emails timed to a live game, the impulse-bet moment regulators worry about most. With betting volumes expected to spike during the tournament, the KSA wants to head off the in-play prompt before it reaches a phone at half-time.
Chair Michel Groothuizen framed the stance around past tournaments. Betting climbed during the 2022 World Cup and the 2024 Euros, which makes the period commercially attractive for operators chasing new sign-ups. He said he understood the incentive but urged operators to keep protecting young adults and vulnerable groups, and warned that where the KSA sees the rules ignored, it will step in immediately.
A campaign aimed at young adults
Enforcement is only half the approach. The KSA also launched a public campaign, "Laat je niet zoek spelen," aimed at young adults and running on Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, to raise awareness of the risks of sports betting during the tournament. The focus on 18-to-24s is deliberate: that group leans toward sports betting over casino play and is the demographic the duty-of-care rules treat as most at risk.
The bigger threat: a full advertising ban
The tournament measures are tactical. The strategic shift is in the coalition agreement published in January 2026, which proposes a complete ban on online gambling advertising and asks whether the number of licences should be capped. Notably, the agreement groups online gambling alongside sex work and drugs, a framing that signals how the political mood has hardened since the market opened in 2021.
The regulator itself is not fully aligned with that direction. KSA leadership has been openly cautious about a total advertising ban and critical of capping licence numbers, on the logic that pushing the legal market down too far simply feeds the illegal one, the communicating-vessels problem that already shows up in the channelisation data, where most players stay legal but nearly half the money has drifted offshore. A new remote-gambling bill is due to go to consultation in the second half of 2026, which is where the advertising question will be settled. For the current rules, see our overview of Dutch advertising restrictions and the sports sponsorship ban. [CHECK URL on both.]
Why it matters beyond the football
The Netherlands isn't acting alone. Other countries tightened their grip around the tournament too, and the broader debate, whether advertising limits actually reduce harm or just reduce visibility, is unresolved everywhere. Belgium, for instance, imposed some of the EU's strictest advertising limits, yet online gambling there nearly doubled from 2018 levels. The pattern regulators keep running into is that big tournaments pull in players regardless of how loud or quiet the advertising is, which leaves the harder question of what actually works still open.
For Dutch players, the practical takeaway is simpler. During the tournament, stick to licensed bookmakers, ignore any site pushing in-play bets at you mid-match, and treat an operator advertising banned markets as a sign it isn't playing by the rules. [CHECK URL.]
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