Good morning and welcome back to the Brazil Sports newsletter. This week, we have tears in the Women’s World Cup after Brazil’s elimination at the hands of the host nation, but we also have some positive signs from the men’s team, which won convincingly this weekend and went into the Copa America quarter-finals on a high. Plus, the future of sports betting in Brazil. Happy reading!
Sports betting in Brazil
In the UK, gambling and football are inextricably linked. With a betting shop on almost every street corner, pubs on the weekend are full of punters glued to their phones, attentively following matches from Spain, Switzerland, Holland, or what have you, hoping their ten-team accumulator will come in.
In Brazil, this is not the case, as gambling on sports has been outlawed since 1946. Alternatives exist, such as a government-sponsored pools game which requires gamblers to predict the outcome of 14 random matches from a given week, and a reasonably popular fantasy football platform known as Cartola FC. Fixed-odds betting, however, is nowhere to be seen.
This could be about to change, however, as a law sanctioned in December of last year legalized the practice of fixed-odds sports betting in the country. This form of gambling has not yet been regulated however, and as things stand, betting companies will require permission from the federal government to set up shop in Brazil.
There is incredible room for growth for sports betting in the country, as a study from thinktank Fundação Getúlio Vargas estimates that the market already moves around BRL 4 billion a year, even working outside of the law. This comes down to the use of international betting sites in Brazil, which allow domestic punters to go online and gamble on Brazilian football, with several such services offering Portuguese versions of their websites.
Online bookmakers have also made a recent push to advertise heavily in Brazilian sport. British gambling operator Sportingbet is one of the most active in the country, circumventing the law by encouraging punters to “make predictions and win prizes,” as opposed to advertising the unregulated practice...
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