Betting on sports in Norway is a bit like stumbling into a Las Vegas casino where the employees are civil servants encouraging healthier gambling habits.
“We try to do this in a really, really responsible way,” said Hans Erlang Rings volt, Norse Tipping’s head of gaming operations. That “grassroots share” can fund your favorite soccer club, donate to your daughter’s hockey team, subsidize your son’s trombone classes, repair your golf course and build the swimming hole you’ll visit on your next holiday.
Norwegians don’t bet on the same sports as Americans, either. And that’s not the most unusual thing about it. It gets redirected into the budgets of Norway’s sports teams (64%), cultural organizations (18%) and humanitarian institutions (18%).
But there is one explanation for Norway’s dominance that sounds especially baffling to American ears.
But the most foreign element of Norway’s unrecognizable betting experience is what happens after the bet is placed, the grassroots share is doled out, and it’s time to distribute the rest of the money. It has nothing to do with how they raise their children or how they develop their athletes or how the Norwegians consistently rank among the world’s happiest and healthiest people. They report to the Minister of Culture.
The fastest way to understand how Norwegian sports betting works is to forget everything you know about legalized American gambling. They don’t work for a publicly traded company with a fiduciary duty to boost their margins and maximize their profits.
The revenue from gambling, lotteries and casino games helps support the country’s sports infrastructure developmental system and Olympic training centers, where elite athletes have access to scientists, strength coaches and performance therapists. This weekend, when Americans burn their money gambling through TV’s biggest event, Norwegians will be directing their attention and bets elsewhere.
“The Winter Olympics is our Super Bowl,” said Ole Morten Brat berg, a Norse Tipping sports product manager.
This one is about money and how much of it they have—and where it comes from. Norway’s system is controlled not by casinos or sports books, but a monopoly run by a state-owned company, Norse Tipping, which is tightly regulated to limit potential losses and prevent irresponsible behavior. BEIJING—Every four years, Americans hear reports of another country’s sane approach to youth sports and peculiar emphasis on having fun, and it’s hard not to wonder if the Norwegians are visiting from a distant planet.
The quest to crack the secrets to Norway’s fantastic success typically happens around this time of the Winter Games, when a country with a population smaller than Wisconsin’s is sitting atop the Olympic medal table as the rest of the world stares up and tries to figure out how they got there.
This unusual arrangement means Norse Tipping executives don’t follow the traditional incentives of commercial operators, which is a very Norwegian way of saying they’re not American. Americans call it profit. To the Norwegians, it’s an investment. Last year, more than $360 million was distributed to sports initiatives around the country, from the youth system to national squads, including nearly $20 million for the Olympics. It doesn’t enrich investors, line the pockets of corporate executives or fuel some glittering neon monstrosity in the desert.
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