Bookies Allowed to Open Shops in Madrid

The bookies might be a feature of every British town, but until now gamblers in Spain have not the same opportunity to pop into a betting shop to take a punt on their favorite football team. Now this is all to change, with licenses to be granted to 10 companies allowing them to open shops in Madrid and the Basque country.

Spanish bookies will not entirely copy their British counterparts, where punters can place bets on anything from the color of the Queen's hat at Ascot to the size of the winning party's majority in general elections.

In Spain, betting will be limited to 30 sports, including traditional Basque games such as La Pelota Vasca (a wall game with a complex set of rules), but bets on political and religious events are strictly prohibited. Football is likely to be the main draw, as 65% of all bets placed online by Spaniards last year were related to the nation's favorite sport.

A spokeswoman for the bookmakers Victoria, part owned by the British company William Hill, said yesterday that it expected to receive licenses within the next few weeks, and planned to open "50 betting shops, some of them to be located in bingo halls and casinos".

Spain has a long history of gambling, but until now it has been confined to bingo halls, casinos and the state-run lottery, on which hundreds of millions of euros are spent each year.

Spaniards are reckoned to gamble about twice as much as the British but those who wanted to do so on sport have, until now, been forced to bet in unofficial office sweepstakes, among friends or on gambling websites based in other countries.

Not everyone is happy about offering new ways to gamble. Máximo Enrique Gutiérrez, president of the Spanish Federation of Rehabilitated Gamblers, said yesterday that he was worried at the prospect of a rise in the number of addicts. Gutiérrez said there were at least 2.5 million "problem gamblers" in Spain, and that he was particularly concerned by the addictive power of bookies, in which "the time between placing a bet and getting the result is very short".