Polymarket Italy: Blocked Twice, With a Sponsorship in Between

Every other country page on this site describes a platform reacting to a regulator. Italy is the one with a business story wrapped around the legal one: a Serie A shirt deal that got signed in the gap between two blocks, then died four months later when the second block landed.

Is Polymarket Legal in Italy? What the ADM Blacklist Actually Says

Italy has run gambling as a state monopoly since Legislative Decree 496/1948, and the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (ADM) — a customs agency that doubles as the gambling regulator — holds blacklist power under Article 102 of Decree-Law No. 104/2020. That power doesn’t require a court case first: the ADM orders Italian ISPs to make a site unreachable, and they do it. Polymarket first landed on that blacklist on October 22, 2025, for operating without an Italian remote-gambling concession — a category that doesn’t exist for event-contract exchanges regardless.

The Lazio Deal: Signed in April, Dead by August

In April 2026, Polymarket became the main shirt sponsor of Lazio, one of Rome’s two Serie A clubs, in a deal reported at €22 million — Lazio’s first main sponsor in nearly three years, and a bet that the December 2025 truce with the ADM would hold. It didn’t. The July 2026 blacklist order made the arrangement impossible to keep running, and the two sides terminated it by mutual agreement in early August. Notably, Polymarket didn’t walk away clean: it agreed to still pay Lazio its full 2026/27 obligation, reported around €9.5 million, and both parties left the door open to a future deal if Italy’s position changes.

Why the Second Block Landed Differently Than the First

The October 2025 block was a straightforward licensing action. The July 2026 one arrived as part of a 293-domain sweep that also caught Kalshi — which never went through Polymarket’s earlier reversal at all, landing on the list cold. Polymarket asked the Lazio court for an emergency suspension of the new block; the court said no, finding the situation didn’t meet the bar for extreme urgency, and pushed the real fight to a full panel hearing on August 25, 2026. As of this writing, no ruling from that hearing has been published.

Is Polymarket Legit, Given It Got Blocked Twice in One Year?

Worth separating, the way this site tries to on every country page. Two ADM blocks are a finding about licensing, not about whether Polymarket pays out on markets that resolve — and a Serie A club was still comfortable putting its name on the platform’s shirt deal in the gap between the blocks. Polymarket also kept paying Lazio’s 2026/27 fee after the sponsorship itself ended, which isn’t the behavior of an operator trying to disappear. Separately, European regulators including ESMA have raised a different question worth knowing about: whether prediction contracts with fixed binary payouts should be treated as financial products rather than gambling at all. That classification fight is unresolved everywhere, Italy included, and it sits apart from whether Polymarket is legit as a company.

Is It Safe to Route Around Two Separate Blocks?

No. Italian ISPs finished implementing the July 2026 order by July 27, and a VPN doesn’t change that an Italian account has no ADM oversight, no licensed dispute process, and none of the consumer protections Italian law attaches to anything classified as gambling here. The December 2025 episode already shows the ADM revisits access on conditions it sets, not on ones a workaround creates. This isn’t a sportsbook and it isn’t a way to make money — a position can resolve to zero the same as it can pay out. 18+, and Italy’s numero verde per il gioco d’azzardo patologico (800 558822) exists if it stops feeling like a choice.