American debates about sports betting tend to assume a one-way ratchet. Markets open, revenue arrives, the line item enters the budget, and the political cost of reversing climbs with every fiscal year. Brazil just ran the experiment in the other direction. Nine days before the first round of its presidential election, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a provisional executive order banning fixed-odds sports betting outright — operation, offering, intermediation and advertising — with new deposits blocked immediately and bettors given until 5 October to withdraw their money.
The order takes effect at once but needs congressional approval within 120 days to survive, and that is where the fight moves. Lula’s government has also drafted a bill creating criminal offences for promoting fixed-odds betting and for using personal data to solicit punters. The stated rationale is not moral but fiscal and medical: households falling into debt. “I made the decision to take a hard, drastic and necessary measure,” Lula said. “It’s like cancer, you take out the tumour, or the tumour will kill us.” The week before, at the UN general assembly, he accused the industry of “transforming addiction into profit” and of “destroying homes.”
The escalation ladder
Brazil’s path here is instructive because it tried the lighter tools first. Gambling has long been illegal, but online betting was opened in 2018 under Michel Temer and expanded under Jair Bolsonaro. In December 2023 Lula signed a law regulating and taxing betting companies for the first time. His administration then blocked more than 2,000 irregular betting sites, some of them linked to organised crime. In October 2025, lawmakers — including many from the party of his rival, Flávio Bolsonaro — struck down his order raising taxes on online betting and virtual casinos. The ban is what came after the tax increase failed and the site blockings proved insufficient.
The numbers behind the decision are the ones the US debate keeps arguing over, in a more concentrated form. A 2025 study by the Institute of Studies for Health Policies put the annual social cost of betting in Brazil at 38.8bn reais, about £5.6bn, with increases in suicide and depression. The central bank estimated Brazilians bet roughly 30bn reais a month — spending that included beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família cash-transfer programme, who were cut off from the platforms last year. Analysts put sports betting revenue at more than $4bn a year, one of the world’s largest markets. Welfare money on one side of the ledger, a registered industry on the other.
The sponsorship weapon
What happened next is the part that travels. Before the order, Brazil’s main football clubs sounded the alarm after betting companies reportedly warned that their sponsorships would end immediately if the government banned betting. The clubs said the ban could mean the end of Brazilian football — a claim widely mocked in a football-mad country by people who have watched the game before gambling money arrived. The threat is a familiar mechanism: the advertiser is also the patron, so a regulatory fight is reframed as a question of whether the public gets to keep the thing it loves.
Polls suggest the ban enjoys broad support among Brazilians, and Flávio Bolsonaro — Lula’s main rival — has dismissed the timing as an “electoral measure.” Both things can be true: a genuinely popular policy signed at the moment it is most politically useful, in a country where the public backlash grew through a World Cup saturated with betting advertising.
Why this lands as an American story
The move was available to Brazil for reasons that are specific and temporary. The market was young enough to still be contestable, the industry’s claim on the public purse was recent, and a president was willing to spend the political capital in an election season. In the United States the equivalent step runs through legislatures that receive industry money and budgets that already count sportsbook revenue, which is why the fight here looks like circuit-by-circuit litigation over who may regulate, not a vote on whether the product should exist.
The 120-day clock in Brazil’s congress is the real test of the ratchet. If the order survives, there will be a working precedent for turning legalisation back off — and an answer to the industry’s claim that once a market is built, the only direction is more.