Chapter 2: Market overviews
China
Most popular sports in China
Country
Sport
China
Football, table tennis, swimming, martial arts, basketball
The most popular sports in China are football, table tennis, swimming and martial arts (in particular
Kung Fu). Basketball is growing in popularity with Chinese former NBA player Yao Ming having
become a national icon.
Sports betting in China has been made difficult because of the same laws that try to prevent other
forms of gaming in the country. One major allowance, however, is that the government offers a limited
kind of legalised bookmaking in the form of the China Sports Lottery. It is more a lottery than actual
sports betting though – it uses the results from recent football matches as the ‘random’ numbers in a
ticket-based lottery system. The China Sports Lottery is extremely profitable, taking in more than $1bn
every year.
The government doesn’t allow proper sportsbooks but there are still bookmakers all over the country.
Recently, many have been moving online where they can operate easier.
On-course horseracing betting returned to China in 2009, 60 years after being banned during the
communist revolution of 1949.
The true scale of the Chinese sports betting market can only be guessed at, but Wang Xuehong, exec
director of the China Centre for Lottery Studies at Peking University, estimates that underground
betting could exceed one trillion yuan ($180bn).
China has long been a target market for sports gaming companies and several bookmakers have
fostered relationships with Chinese companies over the years in the hope that the market will one day
open. For example, Betsson established a business relationship with a local company in China in 2011
that had previously set up a joint venture in the sports lottery related industry together with a Chinese
state owned company.
70 Digital Sports Betting