At the Acadi 2025 Forum in Rome, EGP Fipe-Confcommercio president Emmanuele Cangianelli called for rapid political decisions on gaming machines and warned that illegal gambling was growing. He said he expected immediate measures from early 2026, ahead of a wider reorganisation of the sector.
Gaming-machine operators face uncertainty while Cangianelli says legal provision is losing ground to unlicensed gambling.
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At the 2026 Forum Acadi in Rome, EGP-FIPE president Emmanuele Cangianelli called for clear, stable rules for gaming halls and bingo concessions. He said extensions, unpublished tenders and local restrictions leave operators without certainty and hinder investment in player-protection technology.
Italy's public gambling turnover reached €164.6bn in 2025, up 4.55% from 2024, according to a report from the Ministry of Economy and Finance submitted to Parliament. The report put tax revenue at about €11.4bn; AWP and VLT turnover fell from €46.5bn in 2019 to about €31.4bn in 2025. EGP-FIPE president Emmanuele Cangianelli called for progress on reform of the land-based gambling network.
EGP-FIPE said Italian gaming tax revenue totalled €4.298bn from January to July 2026, down 6.2% year on year. It cited a 6.4% fall in receipts from gaming machines to €3.022bn and called for support for physical venues and technological upgrades to machines.
EGP-FIPE said online gambling in Lombardy generated €13.8bn in turnover in 2025, exceeding the €12.2bn recorded by physical outlets for the first time. Its figures show online gambling grew 207% across Italy from 2019 to 2025, while spending on gaming machines fell 23.6%; the group called for prevention policies to reflect the shift to digital play.
Italy's regulated gambling sector is trapped in a regulatory deadlock that risks expanding unregulated activity, trade body EGP-FIPE told the Senate's Constitutional Affairs Committee. The association criticised local restrictions on land-based operators, calling them largely ineffective for reducing problem gambling. It said the legal market's development had been stalled by repeated extensions of national concessions combined with municipal and regional rules.