South Africa’s betting industry has spent the past week talking about giving players more control over how they gamble. New survey data commissioned by SOFTSWISS suggests one of the harder problems may be getting those controls to the people who aren’t necessarily asking for them.
Among unemployed respondents, 35.3% said online betting regulators and operators should do more to help people set spending limits. Across the full sample, that figure was 43.2%. Unemployed respondents were also the employment group most likely to say they would use substantial winnings or another windfall to pay off debt, at 22.1%.
Those two findings shouldn’t be welded together too neatly. The survey doesn’t establish that the same respondents who would put extra money towards debt are rejecting spending controls, and unemployment on its own tells us nothing about whether someone has a gambling problem. What the numbers do raise is a practical question about how much player protection can depend on people recognising financial risk themselves and then asking an operator to restrict them.
Current bettors complicate any suggestion that people who gamble simply want less regulation. Some 65.7% of current bettors said they wanted stronger protection against underage gambling, compared with 54.5% of people who had never used an online betting service. Attitudes appear to shift depending on the safeguard being discussed.
There’s also a limit to how far these numbers can be pushed. Red Ribbon Communications surveyed 1,000 South African adults between 28 and 31 August, with recruitment deliberately split between users and non-users of online betting. That means active bettors are over-represented compared with the general population. The overall margin of error is given as plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, but the release doesn’t provide the size of the unemployed subgroup or separate confidence intervals for it.
That makes 35.3% an interesting finding among the people surveyed, rather than evidence that exactly 35.3% of unemployed South Africans nationally hold the same view. SOFTSWISS says its full report, including methodology and demographic breakdowns, will be published in the coming weeks.
The timing is still useful. The research follows the inaugural Africa Safer Gambling Week, which ran from 7 to 11 September and brought regulators and industry groups together around spending limits, self-exclusion, underage gambling and illegal operators. South Africa’s National Gambling Board took part in the campaign.
The scale of betting in South Africa makes those questions increasingly difficult to treat as a niche part of gambling regulation. The National Gambling Board’s latest annual reporting puts total gambling turnover at R1.5 trillion in the 2024/25 financial year, with gross gambling revenue reaching R75 billion. Online betting accounted for 60% of that revenue.
SOFTSWISS has a commercial position in this debate. It provides technology to gambling operators and offers responsible-gambling functions including player limits, cooling-off periods and self-exclusion. Its broader 2026 iGaming Trends Report also placed growing emphasis on trust, compliance and the industry’s attempts to present itself as a more mature regulated sector.
That makes the full survey more important than the headline statistic. The employment breakdown, subgroup sizes and exact wording of the questions will help show whether the eight-point gap among unemployed respondents is substantial or simply one result in a relatively small group.
For now, the more useful question is why support for spending controls appears weakest among unemployed respondents while debt repayment ranks comparatively highly in what the same employment group says it would do with extra money. If operators and regulators want player protection to become proactive rather than something people have to seek out once gambling has already become a problem, understanding that gap is part of the work.