> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.

Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.

Is there something specific you're getting at?

I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.

Sadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.