GSGB 2025 in Numbers: How Britons Bet, Including on Baseball
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The Survey That Replaced the Anecdotes
For most of my first three or four years writing about MLB betting from the UK, the question “how many Britons actually bet on baseball” had no good answer. The Gambling Commission’s older Health Survey-derived data was patchy on niche sports. Operator-disclosed numbers were commercially sensitive. Industry estimates ranged so widely that any specific claim was a guess. The Gambling Survey for Great Britain, run by the National Centre for Social Research and published in waves through 2024 and 2025, is the first dataset I trust enough to cite confidently. The methodology is consistent, the sample size is large enough to support sub-product breakdowns, and the wave-on-wave comparisons are coherent.
This article walks through what the GSGB Wave 2 and Wave 3 data say about UK gambling participation, what the demographic breakdowns reveal about where MLB betting fits, and what an MLB-focused UK punter should take from the numbers. The dataset is now comprehensive enough that decisions about market sizing, audience reach, and demographic targeting can be grounded in published statistics rather than inferred from operator marketing.
The Headline Wave 2 Number
GSGB Wave 2 reported that 12 percent of adults in Great Britain had participated in any form of online sports betting in the four weeks preceding the survey. That figure replaces older Health Survey estimates that placed online sports betting participation in the 4 to 6 percent range, and the gap reflects methodology rather than a sudden behavioural shift. The GSGB methodology captures intermittent and lower-stakes participation more comprehensively, and the 12 percent number is the dataset’s best estimate of recent involvement rather than regular engagement.
The implication for any sports betting product, including MLB markets, is that the addressable audience in Great Britain is meaningfully larger than the older numbers suggested. A 12 percent participation rate among adults corresponds to roughly six million people who have placed at least one online sports bet in the prior four weeks. Even if the MLB-interested fraction is small (the survey does not break out baseball as a separate category, but related research has placed UK baseball interest at 5.9 percent among the general population), the absolute number of UK adults who bet on sports and might engage with MLB markets is in the hundreds of thousands.
Andrew Rhodes, CEO of the Gambling Commission, framed the dataset’s broader value at the ICE 2025 World Regulatory Briefing: “We see some much higher peaks of consumer engagement in horseracing around big marquee events, with some data specialists telling us they expect to see higher bets-per-minute thresholds in the year ahead.” That assessment – that the data finally lets regulators reason about gambling participation with the same rigour applied to other consumer behaviours – is shared across operator, regulator and treatment-service sides of the conversation. The GSGB has changed what disagreement looks like in UK gambling policy, because the foundational numbers are now agreed.
Wave 3 and the Online Channel Confirmation
Wave 3 of the GSGB confirmed and refined the Wave 2 picture. Online channels continue to dominate the participation numbers, with mobile apps and mobile browsers accounting for the substantial majority of stake volume. Retail channels (the betting shop) have continued the multi-decade decline. The 8,254 licensed betting premises in Great Britain at the most recent count, of which 5,782 were betting shops, represent a smaller infrastructure than at any point in the last fifteen years, and the GSGB participation data suggests the trend will continue.
For an MLB bettor, the online concentration is unambiguously good news. MLB markets are not stocked at the average UK betting shop counter in any depth. The full slate of moneylines, run lines, totals, player props and futures lives natively on operator websites and apps. The shift to online means the MLB bettor’s product environment is the dominant channel rather than a niche corner of it.
The Wave 3 data also confirmed the active-account number that the operator-reported figures had previously suggested: somewhere around 13.5 million active online gambling accounts in Great Britain, which contains substantial duplication (most active customers hold multiple accounts at multiple operators) but indicates a healthy multi-account market. The competitive geometry that supports line shopping – multiple operators, multiple price points, marginally different overrounds – is robustly evidenced in the GSGB data.
The Demographic Shift
The age and geographic breakdowns from the GSGB are the most interesting part for any product positioning question, including MLB markets. The 25-to-34 age cohort is the heaviest online sports-betting demographic in Great Britain, with 52 percent of online-channel participation concentrated in that age bracket. Geographic concentration is similarly tight: London and Manchester together account for 31 percent of online gambling participation, which over-indexes substantially against their share of the adult population.
For an MLB-focused product, the urban, 25-to-34 demographic is also the demographic most likely to engage with an American sport via streaming. MLB’s UK presence on BBC iPlayer and TNT Sports through 2025 and 2026, the London Series sell-outs, and the 452,000 MLB Europe followers indicate where the audience sits. The overlap between the GSGB-evidenced online-betting demographic and the realistic MLB-fan demographic is substantial.
The gender split in GSGB also matters for product positioning. Online sports-betting participation is higher among men (around 15 percent of adult men) than women (around 4 percent of adult women), although the gap is narrower in younger cohorts. The London-Manchester demographic deep dive sits as the natural follow-up read for any operator or bettor wanting to understand the geographic concentration in detail.
What the GSGB Says About Risk
The GSGB also produces problem-gambling and at-risk gambling indicators, using validated screening instruments. The headline numbers from Wave 2 placed the at-risk gambling rate at around 2.5 percent of adults and the problem-gambling rate at around 0.5 percent of adults. Those figures have stayed broadly stable into Wave 3 and are consistent with the international comparison range.
The 300 percent rise in criminal cases relating to gambling in recent reporting periods is a separate metric from the GSGB participation data, and the relationship between the two is mediated by enforcement focus rather than participation growth. The Gambling Commission’s enforcement priorities have shifted toward unlicensed operators and payment-fraud cases, and the rise in criminal-case volume reflects that focus rather than a participation-driven harm increase.
For an MLB bettor, the at-risk and problem-gambling rates are useful context for personal benchmarking. The framework around deposit limits, time caps, GAMSTOP and statutory levy-funded support services exists because those rates are non-zero and matter at a population level. The disciplined bettor’s workflow – granular consent settings, line shopping, bankroll discipline – is partly the answer to keeping personal participation safely outside the at-risk band.
What MLB Bettors Should Take From the Numbers
Three takeaways are useful for a UK MLB-focused bettor reading the GSGB. First, the addressable UK audience for online sports betting is large enough to support a product that includes deep MLB markets. Operator investment in MLB pricing depth, in-play markets and prop coverage is rational at the GSGB-evidenced participation level, and the trend through 2026 is for that depth to increase rather than decrease.
Second, the demographic profile that the GSGB describes is also the profile most likely to engage with MLB content. The 25-to-34 urban male sub-segment is heavily represented in both the GSGB online-betting numbers and the broader UK MLB audience indicators. That overlap creates a natural product-market fit for MLB betting content and operator marketing alike, subject to the May 2025 marketing consent rules that govern how that audience can be reached.
Third, the GSGB has changed what evidence looks like in UK gambling policy. Operator decisions, regulatory consultations and customer-protection arguments that were previously contested with sparse data are now disputed against a shared dataset. For a bettor, that means the framework being built around stakes, marketing and tax through 2025-2027 is grounded in better numbers than the 2014 Point of Consumption Tax debate could rely on. The decisions may not all be popular within the industry, but the evidential basis is firmer.
The Granular MLB Picture
The GSGB does not publish a baseball-specific participation breakdown, and the realistic UK MLB-betting audience has to be inferred from related indicators. The 5.9 percent figure for UK adults expressing interest in baseball, up from 4 percent a few years earlier, suggests an audience in the low millions in absolute terms. The active MLB Europe social following of around 452,000 indicates a more engaged sub-audience. The London Series 2024 attendance of 108,956 across two games is the most concrete signal of in-person engagement, with the £56.5 million economic impact figure attached to that single fixture pair underlining the commercial scale of the UK MLB opportunity.
Combining those signals with the GSGB online-betting participation rate suggests a UK MLB betting audience in the tens of thousands of regularly engaged customers and a much larger occasional-engagement audience around major events. That sizing is consistent with the operator-side investment in MLB markets at UK-licensed sportsbooks, which has expanded steadily through the 2024 and 2025 seasons and is set to continue with the BBC and TNT Sports broadcast deal extending through 2026.
Common Questions on the GSGB
Two questions come up most often when I discuss the GSGB with UK MLB bettors who have heard of the survey but not read it directly.
What does GSGB stand for and who runs it?
GSGB is the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, a large-scale research study of gambling behaviour run by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) on behalf of the Gambling Commission. The survey was developed to replace older Health Survey-derived data with a methodology specifically designed for gambling research, and the published waves through 2024 and 2025 represent the most comprehensive UK gambling participation dataset available. Results are publicly accessible through the Gambling Commission’s website.
Why is Wave 2 participation higher than older Health Survey numbers?
The 12 percent four-week online sports-betting participation reported in GSGB Wave 2 is higher than older Health Survey estimates principally because of methodology. The GSGB captures intermittent and lower-stakes participation more comprehensively, uses a larger sample size, and asks about gambling behaviour using questions optimised for the research rather than embedded in a broader health survey. The behavioural participation has likely grown modestly over the period, but the bulk of the apparent jump is methodological.
Created by the ”Betting on Baseball Tips” editorial team.
