STS and Fortuna Entertainment Group team up to combat Poland’s grey market

STS and Fortuna Entertainment Group (FEG) are to join forces to launch a new nationwide campaign to encourage people to steer clear of grey-market operators in Poland.

The pair will display the slogan “Play Legally” across the kits of the teams they both separately sponsor, as well as LED screen advertising around the pitches.

Lech Poznań will have the STS logo removed from the front of their shirts, while Legia Warszawa and Miedź Legnica, where Fortuna’s logo appears on the back of the shirt, will have the logos removed in Polish football’s top division, the Ekstraklasa.

The other teams sponsored by the duo, Jagiellonia Białystok, Widzew Łódź, Zagłębie Lubin and Radomiak, will cover the respective sponsor’s logo on their sleeves.

The campaign will also be used on the LED screens during Fortuna 1 Liga matches, the Polish second division, and during the play-off phase of the Polish Volleyball League, where STS is the sponsor.

This new campaign will take place between 12 and 15 May as the operators look to draw attention to their concerns surrounding the Polish grey market.

The operators have cited research conducted by experts at consultancy EY Poland, which found that the grey market accounts for 45% of the entire gambling market in Poland, with turnover in 2021 estimated to be around PLN7.6bn (£1.45bn).

As a result, the Polish state missed out on PLN379m in unpaid betting tax.

Mateusz Juroszek, president of STS, said: “By organising a joint campaign, we want to once again draw attention to what a huge problem for all bookmaking companies legally operating in Poland is the grey market, which is growing year by year.

“Of course, we notice and appreciate the government’s actions against companies that operate in Poland without a licence, but we still assess them as definitely insufficient. The legal part of the industry has been calling for years for stronger measures to be introduced against companies operating outside Polish law, including more effective blocking of illegal websites and payments to them.”

Konrad Komarczuk, president of FEG, added: “While the 2017 amendment to the Gambling Law has clearly improved the situation in the sector, the problem of the grey market has still not been resolved. What is more, the grey market is growing nominally all the time.

“We believe that a more liberal nature of legal regulations, similar to those in most European Union countries, would result in a dynamic development of the bookmaking market in Poland. This, in turn, would be associated with increased revenues for both legal operators and the state budget, or sports entities supported by bookmaking companies with millions of dollars each year under sponsorship agreements.”

This is not the first time that Juroszek has called out grey-market operators in Poland.

In October 2022, he slammed firms including Kindred Group, Betsson and 1XBet for serving the Polish market without a licence.

Speaking to EGR at the time, Juroszek remarked: “I think our issue is that there are still companies such as Kindred, Betsson and 1XBet who operate in Poland. I don’t understand how they can if there is regulation in Poland and it is notified by the European Union. But these companies who operate in Poland are breaking the law.”

These comments came before STS had filed a lawsuit in Poland against Kindred’s Unibet brand for allegedly breaking Polish law. The operator believed that Unibet was circumventing the law by using its Maltese licence to offer its services in Poland.

The result of the lawsuit is still pending at the time of writing.