Announcements

In a ceremony held on June 7 in Krakow, as part of the EL Congress, the first edition of the EL Sport Award was handed to the Bavarian sports club ESV Neuaubing for its “Sports United” project, an initiative that has as an objective to offer real integration opportunities to refugees and asylum seekers in and through sport.

National lotteries united under the umbrella of The European Lotteries Association elected their new President and Executive Committee for the 2017-2019 period during the Association’s General Assembly on 5 June 2017 in Krakow, Poland.

The General Assembly precedes 9th European Lotteries Congress in Krakow hosted together with Totalizator Sportowy.

The main sports policy priorities of next years were defined on May 23 by the EU Sports Ministers, in the meeting of the Education, Youth, Culture and Sports committee (EYCS) of the Council. The three main priorities set for 2017-2020 are sports integrity, economic dimension of sport and sport and society, whereas the working structures foreseen include expert groups, conferences and seminars, as well as cluster meetings. 

The full text of the EU Work Plan for Sport 2017-2020 can be found here.

The French online gaming regulatory authority, ARJEL, and the Global Lottery Monitoring system (GLMS) have signed a partnership protocol, with the purpose of ensuring the sharing of information related to irregular sports betting patterns between the two organizations that both have in place a surveillance system on sports competitions.

Commercial communications for gambling products should continue to be excluded from the scope of the revised Audiovisual Media Service Directive (AMSD). That is the outcome of the vote in the European Parliament’s Culture and Education Committee. EL welcomes this clarification.

EL and WLA, upon invitation of the IOC President, Thomas Bach, participated on February 15 in the 2nd IOC International Forum for Sports Integrity (IFSI), organised in Lausanne. Lotteries joined a wide range of high-level stakeholders from the sports movement, governments, the Council of Europe, the EU and the UN, who flocked to Lausanne on this occasion and had the chance to discuss issues related to match-fixing and good governance in sport.