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Argentina’s legal online betting market accounts for less than a tenth of total gambling activity in the country, according to Betsson Argentina CEO Maximiliano Bellio, speaking to El Cronista’s CEO Talks interview series. Illegal platforms make up the remaining share – a gap Bellio described as the industry’s central challenge, one he said requires a sustained push to bring players over to licensed sites.
Bellio, who built Betsson’s Argentina operation from scratch after the Swedish operator entered the country in January 2022 when betting was first regulated in the City and Province of Buenos Aires — followed later by Córdoba – used the interview to lay out how fragmented that regulatory landscape still is. Each province runs its own licensing regime through its own gaming authority, a structure Bellio compared to the US state-by-state model. The City of Buenos Aires currently licenses 12 operators, the province seven, and Córdoba four, with each jurisdiction developing its own rules while coordinating informally with neighbouring regulators, given how closely Buenos Aires city and province overlap in practice.
Betsson’s local team has grown to more than 100 people across commercial, marketing, finance, risk and development functions, backed by group support out of Malta and Stockholm, where the Nasdaq-listed operator is headquartered.
Betting on football, and betting on legality
Betsson’s growth strategy in Argentina, with shirt deals for Racing Club since May 2023 and Boca Juniors since June of that same year, the latter running through 2028. But Bellio framed those partnerships less as pure marketing reach and more as a channel for steering fans toward licensed platforms and away from unregulated “.com” sites – an approach he credited with winning Betsson a Martín Fierro award last year for a Boca-fronted campaign that emphasised responsible, over-18 betting rather than a straightforward call to wager.
Bellio put a number on how much of that illegal share could realistically shift: working alongside industry chambers Alea and Caxva, Betsson estimates roughly half of current illegal betting activity could eventually migrate to licensed platforms – a figure he tied to Argentina’s banking realities, since only about half the population operates through formal, declared income, and legal operators are required to verify the source of any funds a winning player deposits.
He pointed to biometric verification and cross-checks against Renaper, Argentina’s national identity registry, as tools licensed operators use to keep minors off their platforms – protections he said are structurally impossible for illegal sites to replicate, since those platforms lack access to regulated advertising channels and reach younger audiences mainly through social media influencers instead.
Looking ahead, Bellio said Betsson’s near-term priority is consolidating its existing sponsorships and market position in Argentina rather than an aggressive new push into additional shirt deals, while continuing to back non-football properties like 3×3 basketball, which the operator has sponsored since the discipline received its FIBA licence locally.
