Trillions of Yen May Be Flowing to Illegal International Sports Betting

Yuji Kimura and Kyosuke Murakami / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers

16:15 JST, February 21, 2025

Online sports betting has spread across the globe in recent years. As the phenomenon has grown, Japanese sporting events have become the subjects of some of this gambling, and several trillion yen in bets are believed to be flowing from Japan to illegal overseas markets each year.

This has also created a risk of athletes becoming involved in match-fixing. There is an urgent need for stronger regulations and international cooperation against improper behavior.

Highschool baseball targeted

“School A: 4.02.” “School B: 4.35.” Those are the odds of two high schools, as listed under their real names on a Japanese-language website, to win March’s National Invitational High School Baseball Tournament. The website is a type of illegal online casino, but it advertises itself as “safe” and “available in Japanese.”

In Japan, betting on anything other than certain publicly managed competitions, including horse and bicycle racing, is a violation of the Penal Code, and those who operate such sites may be guilty of the crime of running a gambling place for the purpose of gain. Even so, there are many Japanese-language sites operated from overseas where major Japanese sports such as professional baseball, J.League soccer, sumo and table tennis can be bet on. Users make payments to the operators via payment service providers in Japan.

“I thought it was a gray area,” a Tokyo office worker in his 20s said.

He was obsessed with betting on European soccer and tennis when he was a university student. Using his parents’ credit cards, he “racked up ¥20 million in debt over five years.”

Trillions of yen a year are wagered on domestic sports competitions or sent from Japan to overseas sites, according to an estimate by the Council for Sports Ecosystem Promotion, a Tokyo-based general incorporated foundation that investigates overseas sports betting.

Online gambling spreading

Even after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on private operators in the 1960s, many countries continued to restrict sports betting. However, since the 2000s, the spread of online video streaming of sports events and smartphones has led to the expansion of illegal markets online. The involvement of criminal organizations was pointed in some cases.

As a result, a trend has spread of operators being granted licenses but still being monitored by regulatory authorities. France has strengthened its regulatory measures by blocking access to websites run by illegal operators.

In the United States, a judicial decision made by the Supreme Court in 2018 led to sports betting being legalized in 39 states and Washington, D.C. as of January 2025. Canada also legalized the practice 2021, leaving Japan the only Group of Seven industrialized nation that has not done so.

In the United States, nationwide revenue from sports betting in 2023 was about $11 billion (¥1.66 trillion), which is about seven times what it was three years ago, according to the American Gaming Association and other sources.

Risk of match-fixing

There are particular concerns that sports gambling will lead to match-fixing.

In April last year, a player with the U.S. National Basketball Association destroyed his own career by leaking information about his own health condition to gamblers. In June, Major League Baseball announced that it had banned a player for life for betting on his own team.

In Japan in January, police referred to prosecutors an athlete who had won an Olympic medal with the Japanese men’s table tennis team for allegedly gambling on an overseas online site. He denied placing bets on T.League table tennis or on his own games. As these services become more internationalized and betting methods diversify, athletes are growing more at risk of being embroiled in match-fixing.

Anticorruption treaty

Countries where sports betting has been legalized are also working together to combat corruption. A typical example is the Council of Europe’s Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, known as the Macolin Convention, which came into effect in 2019.

The convention obliges signatory countries to take measures to combat match-fixing, such as by setting up a public body to act as a control center; collecting and analyzing information to detect suspicious games; and establishing awareness-raising campaigns to eradicate improper behavior.

Fourteen countries have ratified the convention, and 29 countries, including European countries, Australia and Morocco, have signed it. Officials in each country keep a close eye on sporting events and exchange information on behavior that is suspected of being improper.

“There is already a large-scale illegal market in Japan,” said Nicolas Sayde, the secretary of the committee in charge of the convention. “It is impossible to effectively deal with the match-fixing problem without international cooperation. We would like to build a cooperative relationship with Japan to protect the integrity of sports.”

Revenue used to aid society overseas

Sports betting has been legalized in some U.S. states and European countries, and part of licensed gambling operators’ revenue is used by governments and other entities for sports promotion, educational support and other activities.

According to the American Gaming Association, Americans bet about $220 billion (¥33.35 trillion) on sports through legal gambling outlets in the five years since 2018, when sports betting was legalized. This has created $3 billion (¥450 billion) in tax revenues for states and other entities to use for social development purposes such as education and medical care.

In France, a system has been established based on a national law in which about 1% of the revenues that licensed operators earn from gambling is directly awarded to organizations that host sporting events, the Council for Sports Ecosystem Promotion said.

The legal sports gambling market in Britain is said to be worth about ¥4.6 trillion, and some of the money is reportedly used to cover the operating and other costs of organizations that work to prevent gambling addiction and treat people who have become dependent.

“It’s necessary to shut out illegal betting operators and protect young people and athletes from the risk of getting involved in sports gambling,” said Hironori Inagaki, a lawyer with expertise in sports betting. Inagaki said it is time to seriously consider measures against sports betting, drawing on precedents around the world. Possible steps would include signing and ratifying the Macolin Convention, Inagaki said.