The Consolidation Wave: iGaming M&A 2025/26

Between spring 2025 and summer 2026, the ownership map of the gambling industry was redrawn faster than in any comparable window since the sector went public. A single private-equity acquisition cleared $6.3bn. The world’s largest listed lottery operator was created in a merger valued at roughly €16bn. And the deals reached into a new frontier — regulated prediction markets — that barely existed as an M&A category two years earlier.

Add up the disclosed transaction values in this report and the total runs well beyond €20bn. This is what a consolidation wave looks like from the inside: vertical integration, private capital taking listed assets off the board, and a cluster of tickers that simply stopped trading. For the wider market backdrop these deals were built on, see the State of European iGaming 2026 report.

The 18 months, on one rail

The clearest way to read the wave is chronologically. The deals did not arrive evenly — they concentrated in the second half of 2025, when three of the largest closings landed within a single quarter.

Private equity plants its flag

The signature deal of the cycle was Apollo Global Management’s $6.3bn all-cash acquisition of IGT’s Gaming & Digital business together with Everi, completed on 1 July 2025. Everi shareholders were paid $14.25 a share; IGT plc received roughly $4.05bn gross. The combined operation kept the “IGT” name and its Las Vegas headquarters — but as a private company, no longer a listed one.

The same transaction split the old IGT in two. Its remaining lottery business became Brightstar Lottery, taking a fresh NYSE ticker, BRSL, from 2 July 2025 and returning $1.1bn of capital to holders. In a single week, one of the industry’s largest listed suppliers was carved into a private gaming arm and a slimmer public lottery pure-play — a textbook private-equity separation.

Lottery builds the biggest company on the board

If Apollo was the boldest financial move, the largest by headline value was industrial. The Allwyn–OPAP merger, announced in October 2025 and closed on 25 March 2026, created what the parties describe as the world’s largest listed lottery group, with a combined value of roughly €16bn ($19.1bn). More than 93% of OPAP shareholders stayed invested; only 6.7% took the cash exit — a rare vote of confidence in a merger of that scale.

Lottery-tech consolidation ran alongside it. In October 2025, Intralot acquired Bally’s International Interactive — its online-casino operation across the UK and Europe — for €2.7bn, structured as €1.53bn cash plus €1.14bn in new Intralot shares. The deal was transformative for Intralot itself, lifting its FY25 revenue by around 35%.

Flutter’s American endgame

For Flutter Entertainment, the period was about closing out ownership it had long pursued. On 10 July 2025 it agreed to buy Boyd Gaming’s 5% of FanDuel for $1.755bn — $1.55bn for the stake plus a $205m market-access revision — taking Flutter to 100% ownership at completion on 31 July. The price implied a valuation for FanDuel of roughly $31bn, a number that reframes how the US market’s leading sportsbook is valued against its listed parent.

Flutter was also active in Latin America, completing the purchase of 56% of NSX Group, owner of Brazil’s Betnacional, for about $350m in cash in May 2025 — a bet on the newly regulated Brazilian market that had opened that January.

The prediction-market land grab

The cycle’s genuinely new category was regulated prediction markets. In late 2025 DraftKings acquired Railbird Technologies, a CFTC-licensed exchange, and used it to launch “DraftKings Predictions.” Then, in a deal that closed on 16 January 2026, Allwyn took a 62.3% stake in PrizePicks, the US daily-fantasy and “pick’em” operator, for a $1.533bn closing payment — an implied enterprise value of $2.5bn, rising to as much as $4.15bn with earnouts.

Not every deal fit the usual buy-side template. In November 2025 Sportradar acquired IMG Arena from Endeavor in a transaction where money flowed the other way: $225m moved to Sportradar (122m in betting-rights prepayments plus 103m in cash), making the effective purchase price negative. It is the clearest sign yet that some sports-data rights portfolios had become liabilities to offload rather than assets to bid for.

Europe’s operators reshuffle too

Away from the marquee US and lottery deals, Europe’s operator layer consolidated in parallel. The wave’s opening move actually pre-dated the period: FDJ’s €2.45bn acquisition of Kindred, completed in October 2024, took Kindred off Nasdaq Stockholm and produced the rebranded FDJ United in 2025 — the template for a national lottery champion buying its way into online betting.

Flutter’s €2.3bn purchase of Snaitech from Playtech, completed in April 2025, was the same logic applied to Italy, one of Europe’s largest markets. And in a deal that ran from October 2025 to April 2026, Banijay Group took majority control of Tipico and merged it with Betclic to create “Banijay Gaming,” backed by a financing package of around €3bn. The two businesses were valued at €4.8bn (Betclic) and €4.6bn (Tipico) — a European operator group assembled almost entirely out of private capital.

Consolidation reached the affiliate and B2B tier as well. Raketech sold Casumba Media for €12m in September 2025, and Gaming Innovation Group’s 2024 split into Gentoo Media (the affiliate arm, Nasdaq Stockholm: G2M) and GiG Software completed its restructuring, with Gentoo delisting from Euronext Oslo on 25 July 2025. The pattern is consistent from the top of the market to the bottom: fewer, larger, and more vertically integrated owners.

The ticker graveyard

Consolidation has a visible cost on the public markets: names that used to trade no longer do. The 2024–26 wave retired or transformed a run of familiar equities.

The deals, ranked by value

Ranking the wave by disclosed value shows how top-heavy it was: the Allwyn–OPAP combination dwarfs everything else, with Apollo’s acquisition the only other transaction in a class of its own before the field narrows to the €2–3bn tier.

What 2026 signals

Three patterns run through the wave. First, private capital is a structural buyer, not a tourist — Apollo’s separation of IGT set the template for taking supply-side assets private. Second, lottery is consolidating into giants, with Allwyn now anchoring the largest listed group and Intralot scaling through the Bally’s deal. Third, the frontier moved — prediction markets went from a curiosity to a category worth $1.5bn-plus in a single acquisition.

One deal is still open: Evolution’s acquisition of Galaxy Gaming, first announced back in 2024, cleared its Mississippi approval in November 2025 but remains subject to outstanding gaming approvals, with the merger deadline twice extended to 17 July 2026. It is a reminder that in this industry, the gating factor on M&A is rarely the money — it is the regulator.

The scoreboard for the period is stark. A handful of transactions each cleared or approached the billion-mark, the combined Allwyn–OPAP group is now the largest listed lottery business in the world, and a private-equity house owns one of the sector’s biggest suppliers outright. Whether the next 18 months slow this pace or extend it, the ownership structure the industry carries into 2027 was set in this window. For running coverage of new deals as they close, see the latest news.

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