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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
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we can just see how he reacted with the sort of disputes with the US, with Trump. He didn't back down for a second. He's not going to be afraid ah of those parts of the industry because honestly, in a way, and this is something, there is a reason why he's running for the fourth mandate. He knows how to sort of wiggle. Brazil's online gambling market has been rocked once again, as a bill was presented to Congress last Wednesday seeking to kill the online gambling market. Just a year after its introduction, the Betz law is now being described as causing economic harm to Brazilian society, and the effort to shutter down the regulated sector is backed by 68 members of the governing PT party, and was presented by a legal caucus led by the PT deputy leader, Pedro Uxay. But where is President Lula, long seen as a critical voice on online gambling, as he campaigns for a fourth term? Are Lula and PT ranked playing politics with the future of the bets law? And does the government really have the stomach to repeal a regime it brought into existence and deal with the consequences for a wide range of stakeholders? Welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove, the creator of positionless marketing. and the number one player engagement solution for sports betting and nine gaming operators. I'm Charlie Horner and today I'm joined by SBC Media's editor-at-large Ted Manmure and our researcher Anna Maria Menezes. Ted, how's things? Very well. uh Good to be here and to discuss this troubling news with Anna. It's never a dull day on iGame nearly, is it? So Ana, it's great to have you on as our Brazil expert, our local expert. How's things? Hi Charlie, hi Ted. Honestly, it's been a while since I've been here and it makes me kind of sad that it's for this reason because this is quite a topic to discuss and we have a lot at stake with it. Yeah, I sort of wonder how many markets this has happened to where it's opened and legalized in one year. and then the very next year they try and block it. That must be, you know, we've banded around the term unprecedented quite a lot recently, but I think that might genuinely be unprecedented. So, Anna, can you give us the reaction to the bill and tell us a little bit about some of the details in there? Yeah, sure. I believe first of all, it's fair to mention that this is not a simple bill to restrain ads and all of that. uh They are really looking to eliminate completely the regulated betting market in Brazil completely. Both land-based, both uh online gambling, all of that. They didn't mention specifically lotteries on that. So that's also uh interesting to know. But in a general way, yes, everything. Crash games, anything that you can think of, online casinos, uh really sports betting as well, everything. So when they first published it, we weren't exactly 100 % surprised because Lula did say that he was going to work with the Congress to try and ban it completely. But it's one thing to say it, it's something else entirely sort of a week later actually presenting a bill to the Congress, to the Chamber of Deputies. So it came quite as a shock, in a way, political shock, a bit of industry alarm. not as much to be honest more than much less than I was expecting now with such a with such a big you know just argument with the bill but honestly how the industry has been reacting to it is first of all they don't think this is gonna go all the way exactly like the bill was written because honestly there's too much money involved they have the fee that they had to pay of 30 million reais This is a lot of money and it's already with the government and they pay for this specific time for the license. So how are you going to revoke this after a year when they paid for much more than that to operate in the country, you know? So there is a little bit of sort of, yeah, I don't think this is actually going to go through. At the same time, some people are feeling very cautious. They're being cautious towards their operations because we never know again, election year. We don't actually know how politicians could be thinking this at this moment. Yeah, it certainly rocks the boat in Brazil. That's for sure. I'll stick with you, Ana, before we go over to Ted, because this has been brought forward by Pedro Uxay and his legal caucus of the PT, the Workers' Party, the governing party in Brazil. First of all, who is Pedro Pedro Uxay and why has his caucus moved forward with the mandate to kill online gambling? Okay, think first it's just interesting to know that Pedro Uxay, he's the current leader for the PT party caucus at the Chamber of Deputies in 2026. So he represents uh the PT party there and he's a federal deputy from Santa Catarina, so south of Brazil. And honestly, This is the party's house leader carrying a bill with this much institutional weight, you know? And honestly, I would, as for the legal caucus of this, I would describe this more carefully as the PT caucus in the chamber, not a formal legal one, you know? But yeah, the bill was filed by Uxay, he already has 68 deputies uh signed in the proposal itself, and overwhelmingly, PT Taperiz but there were a few allies from Pessoal and Rede uh very aligned uh in this case with Pessoal to the left they have some disagreements but still very much inclined to the left and yeah, politically the timing makes sense, know, it aligns with Lula's speech, it aligns with the PT's speech so this has been a party thing not only Lula, you know So, yeah, I'd say that. Ted, I'll bring you in now. First of all, just your initial reactions to this, but also where is Lula in all of this? Because we know he's not really a friend of online gambling. He said that as much, but he did also sign the bill and introduced the law at the start of 2025. yeah, just your initial reactions on that one. I mean, like, I think like all international observers, the first reaction is... there's another kind of twist and turn in the Brazilian market. mean, even reporting from as far back as January this year, we kind of saw Lula return to kind of campaign mode. It was, you know, after kind of the tax debacle last year, it was kind of known that bets would probably be a subject matter that he would pick on. And that also happened. I think what surprised everyone was that someone or a segment of PT has gone forth and actually put a bill forward. Now it kind of falls back to whether Lula actually supports that and whether he's actually going to show a hand on what are his actual sentiments beyond just campaigning, beyond these kinds of slogans as to what he believes should happen to gambling in Brazil. I think it's certainly It's certainly the case that we should be viewing this through the lens and through the context of it's an election year and we should keep that in mind. Ted, I'll stick with you on this one. Do you think there is sort of truth in the statement that online gambling has been an economic harm in Brazil? I think we have had the first round of data coming through in terms of how big the market is, but do you think it holds weight that... that it is an economic harm to the country? No, because as an observer of the market and that transition from, mean, they called it grey, but let's call it what it was. Brazil at one point was a black market and it's now transitioned to a regulated market that is taxed. Now to just kind of ditch that after year one is very dangerous. And it's also, again, we've seen this in other South American markets where after a period, an initial period, politicians kind of reform, reject the market conditions, right, and they start to turn. And I was skeptical that would happen in Brazil. And I'm kind of very surprised that they've gone forward with it. mean, they got their tax rise at the end of the year. I thought that would be kind of like the end of the drama and let kind of the bets law and the bets regime kind of settle for a period. That just hasn't happened. And Anna, I'll come to you for the local insight here. Do you think it has been an economic harm or if not, have there been other signs that online gambling is having negative impacts in terms of, say, advertising and just the presence of the industry around the media and things like that? OK, so let's think about numbers here and we have to think about the numbers that were used to justify the bill. First of all, they used an analysis uh coming from the central bank that five million Bolsa Familia beneficiaries, so the government program that sends uh a certain amount of money, around $100 per month for families, uh and that moved a lot of people out of the poverty line and all of that. But yeah, the analysis show that there were five million Bolsa Familia beneficiaries who sent 3 billion reais via PICS to betting companies in August 2024 alone, with about 70 % of them being heads of the household. This data that was used was already in 2024 sort of backtracked by the president of the central bank at the time, because it was just too much money. It wouldn't make any sense. And then we found out that there was an investigation going on with the federal police, precisely because the money because the money doesn't add up, uh they were thinking, okay, so maybe there's someone using those CPFs, the sort of the ID number that we have here. Someone could be using that. There's an investigation going on about this. This was not taken into account when they were making the bill. So some of the information that they put there to justify is already, first of all, backtrack, second of all, being investigated. precisely because the numbers don't match. So again, we come back to the numbers. ah There are actually a lot of surveys, researches going on about the harm of how much money is actually being taken out of uh essential bills such as power, water, all of that into being used for betting. What we see is who are the people actually asking for this? for this data. The Chamber uh of Commerce here as well and they're very much against betting because they say that people are not buying their products anymore because they're betting. And then we have other data coming to it and saying, well, what people are actually spending on betting is exactly what they would spend on Netflix or something like this. This is leisure. So is it something bad just because they're not spending money exactly on what you want them to be spending money on. Of course, when we talk about addiction here is something else entirely different. We do have, uh we are creating ways to deal with that as well. So when we think about public harm, I do see the government's initiative and the SPA more specifically to help people to maintaining this illegal, illegal industry. illegalized industry, ah but at the same time protecting people, which I think is perfectly fair, which I think is actually good. So you can have a legal, a legalized industry, but also taking care of people who cannot gamble in a healthy way. ah But again, trying to do this without pushing to the illegal side, because on the illegal side, the government cannot do anything to track it, to take care of it. We know how the illegal market works. in a lot of different countries. So yeah, from the public part, from the local part on my side, I do think a lot of data, a lot of data is sort of going on around and people who are not actually every single day looking at the market like I have to be like, I do, they don't see those little, you know, those little threads that are being used in the wrong manner or they're being manipulated in their own way. So yeah. It's great to get that additional context that authors in International Observer just simply couldn't add to this conversation. So it's great to get that side of the debate. So thanks, Anna. We'll take a quick break and then we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit about the politics of all this. Learn how OptiMove's positionalist marketing is changing how iGaming teams operate. Discover how operators are using OptiMove's positionalist marketing platform to launch personalised CRM campaigns, dynamically change casino lobbies and bet slips, and create engaging game-wide experiences. Learn more at OptiMove.com. Welcome back to iGamingDaily, we're talking today all about the threat, the real existential threat that the online gambling market in Brazil is facing right now, and facing from a government that was... ultimately the government that brought it into play. the launch of Brazil was hotly anticipated for many a year, mainly throughout the years of the Bolsonaro government, but also came into the Lula administration, and ultimately it was the Lula administration that passed this and brought it into play. But now they're looking to kill it, essentially. Now, in an election year, does that... pose a threat to Lula's government? Ted, what do you think? In terms of Lula, I think we're going to rewind back to last year. And I think part of the fallout was just how, you know, this debacle that he had on the taxes, especially when it went to Congress and the Senate, and how just PT just fumbled the ball on that. And I think that has kind of scarred him too. The other thing is just if you kind of trace back how the best regime was implemented. think it has like a mixture of every political party in Brazil has its hands on it. I'm just starting to the case of the PT government itself. Yes, they bought it into ascension. Yes, it has lose the sign off, but I don't think anyone in that party was happy with the final output. But is prohibition the right way to go around this? And also as you know, And as previously mentioned in podcasts, like this is an unsettled regime. There's still advertising to go, consumer protections, the implementation or kind of the self-exclusion of a federal level. Big, big projects, right? That can be kind of engineered in the way PT want. ah I don't think it's wise for Falula to just fixate on banning or just restricting outright the market. Ana, please come in on this one. How do you view this through the lens of the Lula government? Honestly, for them, it's just... Okay, I think the best way to describe it is that Lula has always been a politician that was focused on talking to the layers of society that are actually being said to be affected the most. by uh gambling. This is what they say. Like I mentioned, the data of the Bolsa Familia beneficiaries and all of that. So this is the public that Lula ah speaks for and focuses more on. He has a very populist uh way of dealing with politics. And after the depth stories came forward, uh social media saturation, which is something that is pretty big here. So people are sort of tired of hearing about because during the pandemic it was very very much saturated so all of this with the football sponsorships the visibility uh all those ads coming one after the other when games were you know on and all of that the Bolsa Familia Ingo uh all of that just sort of helped the government to just get uh justification enough to just be against it so the government To me, they now seem to believe that the benefits of having a regulated market is just being politically sort of overwhelmed by the image of the family harm, which is something that Lula focused a lot on. So on Women's Day, when he came to do the speech, he talked about family, about women being the house, the head households of families. uh Now we have a new bill that is going on, a very urgent uh timeline. which is reducing the six per one work scale to five per two. So reducing from 40, 44 to 40 hours a week of work obligatory. So it aligns with the other measures that the government is trying to put on here. um And yeah, it just aligns. It aligns with the reelection. It aligns with the whole speech. So it's not really far. from what we were, in a way, expecting him to do. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it comes down to that wider political context and the re-election that the government will seek later this year. Yes. But Ted, look, do you really think that the government wants to get in a fight with all the different stakeholders of this online gambling regime? Not just the operators, but the tax authorities? football clubs, the media, etc. Those are all institutions that you kind of want to keep on side or at the very least you don't want to upset just before an election, I don't know what to say. mean, look, maybe Lula does have the stomach for that and maybe if you are a populist you always kind of need to have this dogfight in you. And if you do kind of feel that you can go after the tax agency, Brazilian football. But I mean, these are... These are enemies that I would want to have in a campaign year. So I'll take that to Anna Maria. mean, does Lula have that stomach to embrace the fight with these camps that have invested interest? Honestly, knowing his previous politics, knowing specifically how he reacts, mean, honestly, we can just see how he reacted with the sort of disputes with the US with Trump, he didn't back down for a second. He's not going to be afraid ah of those parts of the industry because honestly, in a way, and this is something, there is a reason why he's running for the fourth mandate. He knows how to sort of wiggle if that's the best term in English to use here. ah So yeah, honestly, I do think he has sort of the backbone to just go forward with that. don't ah think he would be pressed about that. it would be different if he was being pressed by pressure by the people. That's where the pressure coming from the people is exactly sort of his weak spot in a way. The government has already backtracked from other uh sort of political decisions because the public was very much against it and they backtracked instantly. So, like I said, very populist. I don't think if he knows that the people are on his side in the sense I don't think he would be scared to just follow through and just face as many other high names, big names in Brazil if this would get him re-elected. Yeah, absolutely. mean, without becoming too... uh the rest is politics about it. I think a populist leader would rather go against the establishment rather than the people. in order to remain popular. Let's bring this towards an end then, because this is just the first phase of this, if you like. Do you think this is going to go through as is? Do you think it's going to be watered down? Could this be thrown back in the government's face, much like the tax debacle of last year? How do think this one ends, Anna Maria? Honestly, I do think that what they are doing here right now is just sending a very strong bill aiming to actually be less than that. don't think they're going to go through. mean, they have to. They're going to have some changes in the tax for sure. This was the first draft of the bill that was sent. So there were no mentions about the license fee. There were no mentions about lotteries. A lot of it still has to sort of be organized. ah But I do think they're going to sort of take it down a bit, take down the tone a bit. I do believe that they're going to work with restrictions and heavier restrictions. This one I do believe could go by. It wouldn't be too surprising, ah but that would likely mean tougher advertising limits, pressure on sponsorship visibility, maybe much similar to what's happening in the UK right now. So more responsible gambling obligations. Again, this is very hard to know for now, especially because we have, like I mentioned, the reduced working hours project going in in urgency in the congress. they're probably gonna wait a bit to take care of this and take care of this other one first ah is the biggest, you know, match against the government and the opposition. The opposition who's also going to run Um, for the election, so they have their own stuff going on at this moment. But yeah, I do believe that they're going to do something with it. It's just not going to be exactly how it is right now. Great. And Ted, how do you see this one playing out? I really don't know. And I don't want to predict, I mean, after two years of trying to go to land the Brazilian market, I don't want to say, I think this is what, what proceeds. You know, I think all eyes on October who challenges Lula and where, I think it's down to kind of the PT government. mean, how they're going to kind of re-engineer the bets law. It's not perfect and never has been, but there is, I mean, this is the thing. There is, you know, elements that you can work with and it could be a very, very good market. All right. Well, Brazil as we all know, one of the most talked about and one of the most uh interesting global markets and uh yeah, we'll continue to monitor all the latest updates here on iGaming Daily. Thanks ever so much Ana Maria for joining me today and for your local insights. Thank you Ted for bringing the international angle. We'll leave some links to our coverage in English on SBC News and in Portuguese on SBC Noticias Brazil. And thank you ever so much. to Optimo for supporting the show, and to our audience for tuning in to today's episode of iGaming Daily, and come back tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news. you