Image credit: Source: Gambling.com Group company filing. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
Kevin McCrystle, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Gambling.com Group since 2007, succeeds Charles Gillespie as Chief Executive Officer, with Gillespie moving to Executive Chairman of the Board, under a transition the company disclosed on 26 March 2026 in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The appointments take effect at the close of the company's Annual General Meeting, expected in mid-May 2026.
The move ends a twenty-year run at the top for Gillespie, who co-founded the business in 2006, served as Chief Executive Officer and a director since inception, and added the chairmanship in May 2024. It hands the operating job to the other co-founder rather than an outside hire, a choice the board framed around continuity while the affiliate sector's core distribution channel is under strain.
The two roles, and the split between them
Gambling.com Group's Form 6-K sets out the division of labour plainly. McCrystle has been Chief Operating Officer since 2007 and a director since May 2024, and is based at the company's US headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has overseen the group's primary revenue verticals and the integration of its acquisitions.
Gillespie, as Executive Chairman, keeps an operating remit rather than retiring into a ceremonial seat. Michael Quartieri, the company's Lead Independent Director, said Gillespie's insights and guidance would continue to benefit the company, including through "his active role in evaluating strategic M&A opportunities."
That sentence is the strategy. A founder-chairman pointed at acquisitions and a founder-chief-executive running the operating business is a structure companies adopt when they intend to buy things. Gambling.com Group has grown substantially through acquisition, and the integration record cited in McCrystle's biography is the reason the board can separate the two functions without importing an outsider to hold either.
McCrystle said he was "honored by the trust the Board has shown me and excited by the many opportunities we are executing on to grow Gambling.com Group." Gillespie said he looked forward "to continuing to work closely with him as we move into the next phase of the Company's growth." Both executives were scheduled to jointly host the group's first-quarter 2026 results call, expected in mid-May 2026.
Why the timing matters
The transition lands while the listed affiliates are absorbing the most serious disruption to their model since Google began rewriting gambling search results. This publication has reported on how gambling affiliate SEO is turning into an AI business, and the divergence in results is now visible in the numbers: our Q1 2026 affiliate earnings roundup recorded Catena Media returning to growth while Gambling.com Group took a sharp fall in adjusted EBITDA amid restructuring and investment in artificial intelligence.
Restructuring is an operating problem. So is rebuilding acquisition around owned audience data rather than rented search rankings, the shift underway as affiliates convert into advertising businesses built on affiliate first-party data. Both are jobs for a chief operating officer who has run the verticals for eighteen years, not for a founder whose comparative advantage is capital allocation.
Reading it that way, the announcement is less a succession than a specialisation. The company has separated the person who will fix the machine from the person who will go shopping, and given each of them the title that matches the task.
What it signals about the sector
Founder transitions cluster at inflection points, and the affiliate industry is at one. When the distribution channel that built a business degrades, boards face a choice: hire an operator from outside who owes nothing to the old model, or promote the insider who knows precisely which parts of it still work. Gambling.com Group chose the insider, and kept the founder's dealmaking capacity on the board.
The alternative pattern is visible elsewhere: suppliers hiring senior operating talent out of larger rivals, as Sportradar did in taking Entain's Sameer Deen as Chief Operating Officer. Gambling.com Group has done the opposite and looked inward. Whether that is confidence or caution will be legible in the next four quarters of reported EBITDA.
The M&A remit is the tell
Three things to watch. First, whether the M&A remit attached to the Executive Chairman produces transactions, and whether they are affiliate assets or the media and data businesses the sector's strategy now points toward. Second, whether McCrystle's restructuring restores the margin that the AI investment cycle has been consuming. Third, whether Gillespie's continued executive presence on the board gives the new chief executive room to change direction, or holds the company to the founder's original thesis at exactly the moment the thesis needs revisiting.
Founder-to-founder handovers preserve institutional memory. They are less reliable at producing the break with the past that a broken channel sometimes requires.
Related coverage: Q1 2026 affiliate earnings roundup | Gambling affiliate SEO is turning into an AI business | Affiliate first-party data is the new growth engine | Sportradar hires Entain's Sameer Deen as COO