By Cheché Vidal
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As I establish in my book, titled, precisely, Fair Competition, every competition, like every athlete, must orient itself institutionally toward a constant effort for excellence: the organized will for every structure of a competition, not only its sporting outcome, to serve that end, to become, in fact, a fair competition. The World Cup, the greatest single-sport competition on Earth, has a duty to aspire to be its finest example.
The first two articles in this series examined that orientation at the moment of a single decision: a suspension made under political pressure, a technological review applied unevenly. This article looks further back, at the architecture that makes such decisions possible in the first place: the commercial infrastructure surrounding the final itself.
On Sunday, July 19, Argentina and Spain play the final of the FIFA World Cup 2026. It is, by design, football’s single greatest showcase. And it is, also by design, one of the greatest showcases for the global betting industry. FIFA has named Betano as the tournament’s official sponsor for Europe and South America, alongside prediction-market company ADI Predictstreet and statistics partner Stats Perform. Betting volume on this World Cup, spread across platforms like FanDuel, Kalshi, and Polymarket, has reached historic highs.[1]
The coincidence would not, on its own, warrant institutional analysis were it not for what is happening, in parallel, in the two countries contesting that final.
Two Crises, One Origin
In Argentina, adolescent gambling addiction has become a public health problem. As documented by the University of Buenos Aires, early access, beginning around age 13, facilitated by virtual wallets and easily accessible platforms, has led to cases of extreme severity: adolescents who, after losing their savings or accumulating unpayable debt, have attempted to take their own lives. Reports cited by the university warn that eight in ten Argentine adolescents acknowledge having visited betting sites, or knowing someone who has.[2] The link between youth gambling addiction and suicidal behavior is not a peripheral detail, in that country, it is the core of the alarm.
In Spain, the scale differs but the direction is the same. More than 75,000 minors, and 12% of young people between 18 and 25, are estimated to have serious gambling problems. The proliferation of online platforms and physical venues has brought documented consequences: debt, isolation, and gambling addiction.[3]
Spain, moreover, has responded to that reality with an explicit prohibition: the Sports Law and the regulations of the Royal Spanish Football Federation and LaLiga bar elite players from betting, directly or indirectly, on any competition in which they take part, a restriction the RFEF’s Disciplinary Code classifies as a very serious offense, carrying fines between €1,200 and €100,000 and lengthy sporting suspensions.[4] It is, in effect, a serious regulatory architecture: Spain protects its own athletes from betting as a conflict of interest and a risk to competitive integrity.
But that same protective architecture stops exactly at the edge of the pitch. It protects the player. It does not protect the thirteen-year-old fan watching him play.
Equal Opportunity to Compete, at a Systemic Scale
In an effort the Comité International pour le Fair Play (CIFP), the International Committee for Fair Play, is developing to analyze and study the ideal conditions of a fair competition, we identify Equal Opportunity to Compete as one of the variables that can describe the institutional failure to guarantee equivalent conditions among competitors. Applied here, at a systemic scale, the variable does not describe the players but the very base of the sport: the millions of adolescents in Argentina and Spain for whom the World Cup is not merely a tournament to watch, but a model to imitate. When the competition that teaches sporting excellence is financed, in part, by promoting in those same countries the product that documentably pushes a fraction of that youth toward depression, debt, and, in the most extreme cases, suicide, equal opportunity to compete, no longer on the pitch, but simply to reach it without harm, is compromised before the first match is even played.
This is not about denying that betting generates a legitimate and enormous economy worldwide, nor about proposing its prohibition, something that, in any case, falls well outside FIFA’s authority. It is a more precise question: why use the world’s largest football competition to amplify the promotion of a product, generating, in the process, additional revenue for both FIFA and the betting houses, when that same competition could, without forgoing its economic benefit from the phenomenon, put it in service of the human excellence it claims to represent?
The Norwegian Model
As I explain in my article on Norway, and on how extraordinary its sporting structure is as a competition system that aspires to fair competition, Norway offers a different institutional model: not the prohibition of betting, but its reorientation. Norsk Tipping, a state monopoly, centralizes all gambling activity in the country and transfers its entire surplus to the Ministry of Culture, which distributes it, 63% to sport, 18% to culture, 18% to humanitarian causes.[5] Through the Grasrotandelen program, bettors themselves decide which local club or sports association receives a share of their wager. The bet does not disappear: it becomes direct funding for grassroots sport.
The Norwegian model is not directly transferable to FIFA: it depends on a state monopoly that no international federation can replicate across a global market. But the principle behind it is transferable, and FIFA could promote it as an example for many others. Norway does not ask betting to disappear; it asks it to answer to the excellence it funds. That is, precisely, the question tomorrow’s final leaves unanswered.
The Same Standard
FIFA is no stranger to the idea that certain commercial categories, because they are harmful, deserve a limit even when extraordinarily profitable. The World Cup 2026 Regulations themselves restrict tobacco advertising and use to designated areas, away from the pitch and the technical area,[7] and require concussion protocols that place player welfare above any competitive or commercial consideration.[8] Both rules rest on the same premise: when harm is severe enough and well enough documented, FIFA accepts limiting what may happen around the game.
That same premise should apply to betting. Spain bars its elite players from betting precisely because society positions them as models of competitive excellence, of areté. If the player cannot bet because he embodies the excellence the World Cup claims to represent, the World Cup itself should not promote, to the very audience that watches those players as role models, the activity forbidden to them. This is not a minor contradiction: it is asking the competition to create the context that makes that excellence possible, not one that contradicts it.
FIFA also has the authority to act on this: Article 44 of the World Cup 2026 Regulations designates it as the original owner of all commercial rights to the tournament, with discretionary power to authorize, or condition, their exploitation by third parties.[6] On that basis, there remain, strictly speaking, two institutional options consistent with areté.
The first is to prohibit betting-service advertising within its competitions, just as it already restricts tobacco advertising.[7] The second is to allow it, but only for companies that can certify, to each country’s federation, that they operate under state regulation, and that regulation channels a portion of their revenue to fund local competition, the model Norway already applies.[5] Either option would be enough to close the gap between what the World Cup demands of its players and what it permits from its sponsors.