Esports Betting Statistics: Billions Estimated, Millions Measured

How big is esports betting? The figures on offer run from millions to hundreds of billions. Britain’s largest online operators kept £16.32 million from esports bets in the 12 months to March 2026. Statista models worldwide esports betting at $2.80 billion for 2026. Riot Games says $10.7 billion was bet on just its two official leagues in 2024. Research firms put the whole market at $14 billion to $18.5 billion. And a headline still circulating says it will pass $205 billion by 2027.

Each of those numbers counts something different. Some measure what operators keep after paying winners. Some measure every bet placed. Some don’t say what they measure at all. And one is a headline with nothing behind it.

Short answer: measured, esports betting revenue runs to millions per country. Modelled, it runs to billions worldwide. No regulator or industry body publishes a measured global total, so any single “market size” figure is an estimate.

At a glance

• £16.32 million in esports betting yield for Britain’s largest online operators, in the 12 months to March 2026.
• About 84% of esports betting handles went to just two games in 2025: Counter-Strike (57.0%) and League of Legends (27.3%).
• 15.8% of matches, 4.8% of the money: Valorant’s share of events vs. its share of betting turnover in H1 2025.
• $10.7 billion bet on Riot’s LoL Esports and VCT leagues alone in 2024, according to Riot Games, citing Sportradar.
• 39 esports alerts from IBIA in the first nine months of 2026, already more than the 34 in all of 2025.
• 34 esports matches flagged as suspicious by Sportradar in 2025, down from 41 in 2024. That’s one in every 2,997 matches it monitored.
• $2.80 billion to $18.53 billion: the range of 2026 esports betting market estimates from Statista and two research firms.

From Measured to Modelled: The Esports Betting Ladder

Ask how big esports betting is, and you’ll get answers ranging from millions to hundreds of billions. They aren’t measuring the same thing. Each rung below counts something different, and only the bottom one comes from operators’ own returns.

The esports betting ladderFive figures that get called “the esports betting market.”

The bottom rung is the only one you can add up yourself. The Gambling Commission published it month by month from operators’ own returns. But it covers only one country, and only the largest operators, about 70% of Britain’s online market.

The middle rungs are mostly models. Statista’s own page calls its figures net revenue in one place and gross revenue in another. The Business Research Company, Market Research Future and Business Research Insights don’t say whether they measure money bet or money kept. Even for 2025, a year that has already ended, the two firms that publish a figure are $2.17 billion apart.

That matters. A handle figure counts every bet placed. A revenue figure counts what operators keep after paying winners. The two can be far apart, so they don’t belong on the same scale. Only one figure clearly counts money bets. Riot Games, citing Sportradar, says $10.7 billion was bet on its two official leagues alone in 2024.

The top rung isn’t a measurement or a model. It’s a headline. It comes from a 2021 article that was paid promotion for an esports betting company. The report the article actually cites projects $20.73 billion for 2027, about a tenth of the headline.

So “how big is esports betting?” has no single answer. Measured, it’s millions per country. Modelled, it’s billions worldwide. No one publishes a measured global total.

Two Games Take Most of the Money

Esports covers dozens of games. Betting money doesn’t. In 2025, two games took more than four of every five dollars bet.

Share of esports betting handle by game, 2025Kambi network, 50+ operators in regulated markets

Counter-Strike and League of Legends together took about 84% of all esports betting handles. The league grew its share by roughly 2 points the year before.

Dota 2 is going the other way. Its share was 14% in 2023, 10.5% in 2024 and 7.7% in 2025. In two years, it lost about half its share.

These figures come from Sharpr’s Global Esports Betting Monitor, produced with Abios. The data covers the Kambi network, more than 50 operators in regulated markets. It doesn’t include offshore or unlicensed sites, where a lot of esports betting happens. The report itself notes that “market data may vary depending on the source.”

One tournament can look very different. At the Esports World Cup 2026, Dota 2 took 31.8% of betting turnover, behind only Counter-Strike 2 at 41%, according to DATA.BET. That’s one supplier’s data for one seven-week event, not the whole year.

More Matches Don’t Mean More Money

You might expect a game with more matches to draw more bets. It doesn’t work that way. In the first half of 2025, the share of matches a game supplied and the share of money it drew were often far apart.

Share of events vs. share of betting turnover, H1 2025Kambi network, 50+ operators in regulated markets

Valorant is the clearest case. It supplied almost one in six matches, but drew less than one in twenty dollars bet. Counter-Strike went the other way. It supplied 40% of matches and drew 57.2% of the money. Sharpr calls it the only game that “performs above parity in both dimensions.”

The same split shows up in bet size. At the Esports World Cup 2026, Counter-Strike 2 drew the most turnover but had the smallest average bet of the top four games, according to DATA.BET. League of Legends had the largest average bet but only 8.5% of turnover.

So no single number turns matches or bets into betting money. Each game converts them at its own rate.

Regions show the same gap. Latin America placed over 21% of all esports bets in H1 2025, but drew just 10.3% of the money. Its bettors place more frequent, smaller bets.

What Britain Actually Measured

Britain is the only country that published esports betting revenue month by month. The Gambling Commission started collecting it during the pandemic, from the largest online operators. Together, they cover about 70% of the online market. The series ran from March 2020 to March 2026 and has now ended.

The largest online operators reported £16.32 million in esports betting gross gambling yield in the 12 months to March 2026. That’s the money operators kept after paying out winnings. It’s not the amount people bet.

That’s a small slice of online gambling. From January to March 2026, esports betting made up about 0.25% of the online yield those operators reported, or about one pound in every 400.

Esports betting yield, Britain’s largest online operators, by year

Yearly totals and the 0.25% share are from the Commission’s monthly figures.

The record month came during lockdown. In May 2020, with most live sport cancelled, esports betting yield reached £4.61 million. In March 2019, before the pandemic, it was £48,556.

After that, the yearly total stayed between about £8 million and £17 million. It went up and down. It didn’t grow every year.

The Commission also warns that this data can’t be compared with its official industry statistics. It covers only part of the market, and it may include free bets and bonuses.

Alerts Measure Suspicion, Not Fixing

The International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) is a group of licensed betting operators. When its members see betting on a match that looks wrong, such as sudden heavy bets on an unlikely result, IBIA sends an alert to the relevant authorities.

Esports has become one of its busiest categories.

Esports alerts reported by IBIA, by quarter

In 2025, esports made up 34 of IBIA’s 300 alerts, or 11%. In the first nine months of 2026, it already had 39, more than all of 2025.

The ranking shifts a lot from quarter to quarter. Esports was third among all sports in Q1 2026, second in Q2 behind only football, then fifth in Q3.

None of these alerts are tied to a country. IBIA files every esports alert as “Global,” because, in its words, “event locations can be transnational.” One match can involve teams, servers and bettors in several countries.

Two things to keep in mind when reading these numbers. First, an alert means the betting looked suspicious. It doesn’t mean a match was fixed. Second, more alerts can mean more monitoring, not more fixing. IBIA also notes that each quarterly figure “may be revised depending on the outcome of any ongoing investigations.”

Two Monitors, Two Stories

IBIA isn’t the only group watching esports betting. Sportradar monitors matches for sports bodies and betting companies. Its numbers tell a calmer story.

In 2025, Sportradar flagged 34 suspicious esports matches, down from 41 in 2024. That’s 0.03% of the esports matches it monitored, or one in 2,997, a very low rate.

The two 2025 numbers look the same, but they don’t count the same thing. IBIA counts alerts. Sportradar counts matches it judged suspicious. Neither says a match was fixed, and Sportradar itself calls its figures “indicative.”

Proving a fix is harder than spotting one. In September 2026, the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) banned Dota 2 coach Juan “Vintage” Angulo for life. It found he had agreed to make his team, PTime, lose a series at the Esports World Cup 2026 in exchange for a reward. The planned result never happened. Player Oswaldo “DarkMago” Herrera got five years, not for fixing, but for failing to report what he knew. Both can still appeal.

Skin Gambling: Outside the Count

Every number above comes from licensed betting. Skin gambling isn’t in any of them.

Skins are cosmetic items in games like Counter-Strike 2, such as weapon designs that change how a gun looks. They have no effect on play, but they can be traded and sold for real money. Skin gambling sites let people bet those items on match results, coin flips or roulette instead of cash.

These sites aren’t legal in Great Britain. A review commissioned by the UK government checked 20 of them, and none checked users’ ages at the point of use.

So no regulator, supplier or integrity body counts skin gambling. What exists are glimpses. The same government review counted 6.9 million unique visits to skin gambling sites worldwide in February 2025, across 45 sites with traffic data. Britain made up 3.93% of that, or about 271,000 visits.

In February 2026, New York’s Attorney General sued Valve, the maker of Counter-Strike 2, alleging that its loot boxes are illegal gambling. Its announcement cites reports that the Counter-Strike skin market passed $4.3 billion in March 2025.

Neither is a betting figure. The first counts site visits, not bets or bettors. The second is the value of the items, not the money staked with them. A skin can change hands many times, or never be bet at all.

Forecasts Climb, Measured Revenue Doesn’t

Most readers expect esports betting to be booming. The forecasts say it is. Every research firm in the ladder predicts steady growth for years to come.

Esports betting forecasts

One supplier’s numbers back them up. DATA.BET, which runs esports betting for partner sportsbooks, said its esports GGR nearly doubled in Q1 2026 compared with a year earlier. Turnover rose 70.6%, and the number of bets rose 33.2%. But those figures cover only DATA.BET’s own partners. The company didn’t say how many partners that is, or give any amounts. It also credited part of the jump to partners running bigger promotions.

The one country that measured its esports betting tells a flatter story. Britain’s largest online operators kept £16.66 million from esports bets in 2021. In 2025, they kept £15.64 million, a little less. In between, the total fell as low as £7.75 million and climbed back. It went up and down, but it didn’t grow.

The latest months were stronger. From January to March 2026, those operators kept £3.90 million, about 21% more than a year earlier. One good quarter isn’t a trend, though, and the series ended there.

Yearly totals, the Q1 2026 total and the 21% are from the Gambling Commission’s monthly figures.

None of this proves the forecasts wrong. Britain is one market, and DATA.BET is one supplier. Growth can happen elsewhere, and a supplier can grow by winning business from rivals. But it does show that the forecasts aren’t built on measured data, because almost none is published.

Numbers that don't survive checking

Esports betting figures get copied from page to page. Each copy drops a little more of the original context: the year, the scope, or who first said it. After a few rounds, a number can look solid while pointing back to nothing.

An attempt was made to trace every widely quoted figure to the page it came from. These are the ones that didn’t hold up. Some came from a headline, not a report. Some are credited to a real source, but link only to its homepage. Others are close to the real figure, but describe something different.

Most of these numbers aren’t made up. They usually start from something real, then lose a detail along the way. That’s why the year, the scope and the source page matter as much as the figure itself. If a page can’t show where its number came from, treat it as a lead, not a fact.

What nobody publishes

Some numbers look like they should exist, but they can’t be found anywhere. Their absence is part of the answer. It’s why so many pages fall back on modelled figures and copied claims.

The biggest gap is money. No regulator, supplier or industry body adds up measured esports betting revenue or handle across countries. The research firms that publish market sizes don’t clearly say whether they count money bet or money kept. The only named turnover figure covers just Riot’s two official leagues, for 2024. Britain had the one public monthly series that split out esports, and its March 2026 edition was the last.

Integrity data has a gap too. IBIA reports how many esports alerts it sends, but its reports don’t say which games those alerts cover.

Skins and bettors are the least counted of all. Researchers can count visits to skin gambling sites, and lawsuits can cite what the skins are worth, but nobody counts the bets. One betting network publishes age shares for esports bettors, but there’s no dated, sourced count of how many people bet on esports at all.

Until these exist, any single figure for “the esports betting market” is a model, a sample or a guess. The honest answer is a range, with a note on what each number counts.

How to Check It Yourself

A page that questions everyone else’s numbers should be easy to check itself. Each figure here can be found in a few clicks. Some pages update over time, so expect small differences.

1. Britain’s esports betting yield (£16.32m). Open the Gambling Commission’s “Gambling business data on gambling to March 2026” page. The latest months are in Table 4, in the row labelled “Betting (eSports).” For the full series back to March 2020, download the Excel file under “Data and downloads” and add up the 12 months from April 2025 to March 2026.
2. Esports alerts (IBIA). Open each quarterly report on IBIA’s website. The esports figure sits in the breakdown by sport, alongside its share of all alerts. The 2025 annual report also gives esports alerts by quarter.
3. Suspicious esports matches (Sportradar). Open Sportradar’s “Integrity in Action 2025” report. The counts for 2025 and 2024 are in the table of suspicious matches by sport. The rate, 0.03% or one in 2,997, is on page 9.
4. Betting share by game. Read Sharpr’s “Global Esports Betting Monitor: H2 2025.” The shares for Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Dota 2 and Valorant are in the first section.
5. Events vs. turnover. Read Sharpr’s H1 2025 report. The section on yield per event gives each game’s share of events, share of turnover and ratio.
6. Turnover on Riot’s leagues ($10.7bn). Open Riot Games’ post on esports betting sponsorships. The figure is under “Why Sports Betting & Why Now.”
7. Market size. Open the research firms’ pages on the same day. Check which year each figure is for, and whether the page says what it measures. Statista’s betting figure is in the free Highlights at the top of its Esports – Worldwide page.
8. The $205bn claim. Read the article itself, not just the headline. The figure in the body is $20.73 billion.
9. Skin gambling site visits (6.9m). Open the UK government’s “A rapid evidence review of skin gambling.” The figure is in the Key findings and in section 2.2.

The Counter-Strike skin market ($4.3bn). Read the New York Attorney General’s press release from 25 February 2026. It cites the figure as a report.

Where These Numbers Come From

The figures on this page come from the source closest to the data wherever one could be found: regulators’ releases, integrity bodies’ reports and companies’ own announcements.

Several of those sources have a stake in the answer. The research firms sell the reports their figures advertise. Sharpr’s game shares are produced with Abios, a Kambi-owned esports data and odds provider, and each report promotes Abios’s products. DATA.BET’s growth figures come from an announcement about its own business. Sportradar sells data and services to betting operators while also monitoring matches for integrity. Riot Games’ $10.7 billion figure appears in a post explaining why it opened its leagues to betting sponsors, a programme it earns revenue from.

That doesn’t make any figure wrong. It’s simply worth knowing who published a number, and why. The Gambling Commission is the only source here with no commercial interest in the result.

Esports betting is one corner of a wider market. For the rest, see our online sports betting statistics, male vs female gambling statistics and crypto gambling statistics. If you find an error, tell us and we'll correct it with the date shown.

Sources

Every figure above traces to one of these.

1. Business Research Insights, Esports Betting Market Size, Share, Growth and Industry Analysisbusinessresearchinsights.com
2. The Business Research Company, E-Sports Betting Global Market Report 2026thebusinessresearchcompany.com
3. Gambling Commission, Gambling business data on gambling to March 2026 (published May 2026)gamblingcommission.gov.uk
4. SoloAzar, Global Esports Betting Market Expected to Exceed $205 Billion By 2027soloazar.com
5. Statista, Esports – Worldwidestatista.com
6. Sharpr, Global Esports Betting Monitor: H2 2025sharpr.substack.com
7. DATA.BET, Betting Data & Insights from the Esports World Cupdata.bet
8. Riot Games, Why We’re Opening Betting Sponsorships in Esports & How We’re Doing It Responsiblyriotgames.com
9. Gambling Commission, Market overview: operator data to March 2026 (published May 2026)gamblingcommission.gov.uk
10. IBIA, Integrity Report: Q1 2026ibia.bet
11. IBIA, Integrity Report: Q2 2026ibia.bet
12. IBIA, Q3INTEGRITY REPORT 2026ibia.bet
13. IBIA, 2025 Sports Betting Integrity Reportibia.bet
14. ESIC, ESIC Imposes Lifetime Ban on Juan “Vintage” Angulo and Five-Year Ban on Oswaldo “DarkMago” Herrera Following EWC26 Integrity Investigationesic.gg
15. New York State Attorney General, Attorney General James Sues Game Developer for Promoting Illegal Gambling Through Video Gamesag.ny.gov
16. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, A rapid evidence review of skins gamblinggov.uk
17. Voxbooster, Esports Betting Statistics 2026voxbooster.com
18. Track360, Esports Betting Statistics 2026track360.io