Brazil moves to regulate sports betting

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Tuesday issued a provisional decree regulating sports betting platforms, a multi-billion dollar market that has operated in a legal gray area for years.

Public lotteries are legal in Brazil, but most forms of gambling are not. Casinos were famously banned in 1946 by conservative President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, years after a sort of “golden age” during which gambling houses sponsored concerts and artists such as Carmen Miranda.

In 2018, the Michel Temer administration issued an executive order permitting sports betting as a new form of lottery. However, regulation remained pending. As The Brazilian Report has shown, this led the government to request investigations into how betting platforms currently operate.

Since the government failed to provide regulation for betting platforms, they remain officially based abroad, despite airing ads in Brazil and sponsoring Brazilian football teams. Most are also careful enough not to use the word “betting” in their ads, instead talking around the issue with tongue-in-cheek terms.

Finance Minister Fernando Haddad has said taxing sports betting could generate up to BRL 15 billion (USD 3.1 billion) a year. José Francisco Manssur, a special assistant at the Finance Ministry, has offered a more modest estimate of BRL 10 million a day, which would amount to BRL 3.6 billion a year.

BNL Data, a specialized news website run by the pro-gambling NGO Instituto Brasileiro Jogo Legal, claims that the country’s gambling market was worth more than BRL 7 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach BRL 12 billion this year.

An April survey with over 2,000 Brazilians aged 16 or over and commissioned by news media outlet Mobile Time shows...