A survey by media outlet Mobile Time and research platform Opinion Box shows just how massive sports betting apps already are in Brazil.
Interviewing more than 2,000 smartphone users, the survey discovered that 25 percent of them have already put money on a sports betting app. Most betters are young males from low-income families.
Among Brazilians in the A and B socioeconomic classes (earning more than ten times the minimum wage), 22 percent of smartphone users have bet on these apps. In the lower-income strata (D and E), meanwhile, this rate rises to 30 percent.
On top of that, 60 percent of users recognize that they lost more money than they won on these apps; 65 percent among bettors from classes D and E.
The most popular sports betting apps in Brazil are Bet365, Betano, Blaze Pixbet, and Sportingbet.
Sports betting apps were legalized in 2018, by a decree of then-President Michel Temer, as a form of national lottery. The Brazilian Congress approved the decree at the end of that year, with the law requiring the Finance Ministry to regulate the activity within four years — a deadline that has already passed.
The Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration is trying to make up for lost time, as it sees in this activity a source of tax revenue that it will need if it wants to reach the primary surplus targets set for this and coming years.
An ongoing match-fixing scandal in the country’s football league, however, has cast a shadow over the nascent industry and the government’s recent efforts to regulate and tax it. All clubs in Brazil’s top-flight division are sponsored by betting companies.
Early this month, the Justice Ministry asked the Federal Police to investigate a match-fixing scheme in Brazilian football after prosecutors found that several players were paid to deliberately receive yellow cards during matches.
A month earlier, the Finance Ministry had asked eight of Brazil’s top teams to clarify their relationship with the platforms, as most of them have sports betting companies among their main sponsors now.
Also in April, Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said that he estimates that taxes on these platforms could bring in between BRL 12 billion and BRL 15 billion (USD 2.3 to 3 billion) per year in revenues.
At the same time, the Brazilian football association CBF has been lobbying the Finance Ministry for a bigger slice of the tax revenue coming from these platforms. In Brazil, organizations that license their brands to sports lottery games operated by state-controlled banks and entities get 1.63 percent of the net revenue from bets.
CBF now wants a similar treatment regarding sports betting platforms, that is, a 4 percent share of their gross revenue.
Search
