TORONTO, May 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Canada is co-hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with the national team playing all three group-stage games on home soil for the first time – but new research from CasinoCanada.com finds that for many outside Ontario, the national licensed betting options simply aren’t built for what’s coming.
The analysis, drawing on provincial regulatory data, iGaming Ontario’s annual figures and more, maps out how differently Canadians across the country will experience sports betting during the biggest football tournament the country has ever hosted.
The picture in Ontario is relatively healthy. Ontario’s open, competitive market – home to nearly 50 licensed operators – means more than four in five Ontario bettors are using regulated platforms. For most of the country, though, the situation looks very different.
In Saskatchewan, an estimated 93% of online bets are played through unregulated offshore sites rather than licensed Canadian platforms. Alberta and Manitoba sit at 88%, and British Columbia – where a provincial platform has operated for years – loses around half its online betting market to offshore alternatives.
Alberta’s situation has a particular timing problem. The province is currently opening up its market to licensed competition, but the deadline for operators to register falls on 13 July 2026, after the World Cup has already reached the quarter-finals. That means Alberta bettors, who are already some of the most likely in Canada to use offshore sites, will be doing so during the tournament’s peak.
The scale of interest is hard to overstate. During the 2022 World Cup, 99% of bets placed on British Columbia’s PlayNow platform backed Canada to advance from the group stage. With Canada co-hosting in 2026 and playing at home, that enthusiasm is expected to be considerably higher – landing into a system that, outside Ontario, was never designed to absorb it.
Eugene Ravdin, Head of PR for CasinoCanada, said: “Canada is hosting the World Cup, and millions of fans are going to want to bet on it – including on their own team. The problem is that for a lot of Canadians, the licensed options available to them aren’t competitive enough to win that business.
“So, bettors end up going offshore to platforms with no Canadian consumer protections. The World Cup is going to make that gap impossible to ignore.”
The full article can be read here: https://casinocanada.com/blog/is-canada-s-betting-infrastructure-ready-for-the-2026-fifa-world-cup/
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