In June 2026, Baltic Football News entered into a partnership with Tonybet – an international online gaming company with a footprint in Latvia and Estonia and, among other things, the general sponsor of the Virsliga as well as of FC RFS and FC Nõmme United. While we took great care to learn about our new partners before proceeding with this collaboration, which, very critically, allows us to continue to bring football news from this exciting region to all football connoisseurs free of charge and in an increasing number of languages, we also wish to introduce Tonybet to you, our valued readers.
Tonybet today is a multi-jurisdictional operator, licensed across Europe and North America – in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Estonia, Latvia and beyond. These different territories share technology, compliance standards and product infrastructure. When learning more about how Tonybet operates and ensures compliance and security, this multinational angle came up repeatedly. Essentially, because the entire group shares the same technological backbone, the common denominator falls to the laws, regulations and requirements of the most restrictive of the jurisdictions within which the company operates. What this means is that someone in Tallinn benefits from the same fraud detection and responsible-gaming systems the company built for some of the world’s strictest regulators, which is very good.
Atop this common infrastructure sits a rather distributed and heavily localised network of local Tonybet organizations – Latvian for Latvia, Estonian for Estonia and so on. This is a feature of how Tonybet markets itself – which clubs it backs, which competitions it gets behind, how it shows up on a match day – is shaped by people who live and work in the region, not handed down from elsewhere. As company representatives described it during our conversations: “the strategy is international; the way it reaches people is local“.
Why the Virslīga, and why FC RFS
For local football fans, Tonybet will be best known in Latvia as the general sponsor of the Virsliga, taking over from Optibet in 2024, and as the main sponsor of FC RFS – one of the leading clubs in the region. Choosing to sponsor both at the time of entering the Latvian market was deliberate. The company’s own data confirmed what most Latvians already feel (despite what the loud minority on social media may suggest) – football is the country’s dominant sport, so backing the league meant investing in the thing people care about most. In terms of FC RFS, a club that barely existed in its current form a decade ago, sponsoring them represented a different kind of bet for Tonybet – one of ambition the company felt worth associating their name with. As we all know, history wasted no timing proving them right as already in January 2025, FC RFS beat Ajax 1–0 at a sold-out Daugava Stadium, becoming the first Latvian club to win a match at the European league-phase level. Tonybet’s name, of course, was front and centre.
Beyond the league and a single club, Tonybet has also supported the Latvian Football Federation, backing both the men’s and women’s national teams under an agreement that runs to the end of 2026.
Three years in: did it pay off?
According to Tonybet, by the measures that matter to them, yes. Attendances have risen, the football has improved, and the 2025 season produced a real title race that ended with Riga FC taking the title for the first time in five years. But what Tonybet highlighted the most was the clubs and the grassroots football around them, and how that connected the brand into the everyday life of Latvian sport – the packed weekends, the families in the stands, community and the local game given resources to develop.
“Visibility was never the point on its own,” says Jurijs Rapoports, Chairman of the Board and COO of Tonybet. “We wanted to be part of something that mattered to communities here, and to back it for long enough that the investment actually changed things. Three years in, the league is stronger, the clubs are more ambitious, and we are more committed than we were on day one. That is the return we were looking for.”
What comes next?
The next step is quite literally under construction. Later this year, the Tonybet Padel arena opens in Riga – a roughly €10 million purpose-built venue with twelve professional-standard courts, built in response to a rise in demand for padel that has run ahead of the supply of decent facilities in Latvia.
Tonybet in Estonia carries the same logic further north. In Tallinn, Tonybet has served as principal sponsor of FC Nõmme United since 2024 under a three-year agreement. The club is built around the Mart Poom Football School and returned to the top flight after winning the 2025 Esiliiga. It is a smaller, quieter commitment than the Latvian partnership, but consistent with the same ideals as Tonybet chose a club that places youth development at the centre of its model.
Off the pitch, Tonybet has stayed a licensed, tax-paying operator throughout the recent dispute over Estonia’s gambling-tax framework, using its membership of the Estonian Gambling Operators League to press for the thing it values most – regulatory predictability.
The harder questions
Betting and gambling are controversial industries the benefits of which for sport can be just as great as the harm they can inflict on vulnerable groups in the population. It was very important for us to understand how our new partners think about themselves and the industry within which they operate. Tonybet’s response was to argue from evidence of their actions rather than from abstract first principles.
As a licensed operator, it verifies identity and age in ways the offshore market does not bother with, runs affordability checks so that its income does not rest on people betting beyond their means, and uses automated systems to catch the behaviour that tends to precede trouble. On that last point Tonybet is careful about one thing – an algorithm may flag a player, but a person decides whether to act, and no model has the final word on whether someone can keep playing. On integrity, regulated firms watch betting patterns and pass what they find to leagues and authorities, which is the plain reason match-fixing is harder to run through a licensed book than an unlicensed one.
That is the working case for regulation over prohibition. A licensed operator can be audited, fined and made to protect its customers; an unlicensed site answers to no one. It does not settle every objection, and Tonybet does not pretend it does. But the principle the company keeps coming back to is simple – that customers are a community to look after, but not to police over. Overly blunt restrictions tend to hit companies who follow the rules, while doing nothing to those operating without permission; tighten the screws too far on the legal market and you risk pushing customers toward the very places that offer them no protection at all.
The longer-term ambition of the company is that gambling, run with care and designed honestly, might one day sit alongside other forms of entertainment without the stigma that still attaches to it. That depends on the industry holding itself to a standard the law does not strictly demand, as well as on individual operators being judged by what they do rather than what they say.
Partnership between Tonybet and Baltic Football News run until the end of 2026 and covers a range of promotional activities.
