In an article written for the newspaper O Globo last Sunday (19), lawyer José Francisco Manssur and journalist Marcelo Damato took a stand against Bill 1,808/2026, which aims to prohibit the regulated betting market.
In the text, the authors make a direct comparison with Prohibition in the United States.
What is the relationship between the Dry Law and the ban on the regulated betting market
According to them, when it was implemented in the country in 1920, the law prohibited the distribution and sale of drinks with the aim of protecting families, reducing social problems and improving productivity.
However, the country had a completely opposite result.
“It strengthened the Mafia, stimulated the underground market, increased health risks and produced a long institutional liability that lasted decades after the end of the law, in 1933”, they explain in the article.
For José Francisco Manssur and Marcelo Damato, the project presented by representative Pedro Uczai (PT-SC) could also represent a historic error in proposing a ban on betting in Brazil.
“Prohibiting the regulated market will not stop Brazilians from betting. It will only make them leave the environment supervised by the State and return to illegal platforms”, they mention.
Companies made investments to bring the country into compliance
Currently, Brazil has 84 companies authorized to operate in the regulated betting market. Each of them has a contract valid for five years.
To comply with the rules imposed by the State, each company paid R$30 million in concessions.
In addition, companies needed to invest an amount to comply with legal and regulatory requirements, such as headquarters, administration, compliance structures and “hundreds of rules adopted by the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA)”, as the text says.
“The question, then, is inevitable: what image does Brazil want to convey to the world?
That of a country that, after regulating a sector, charging million-dollar grants, demanding high investments for a multi-annual authorization, in year 2 prohibits the very activity that it authorized?
What security will investors from other segments have when they see a market opened by the State being closed soon after?”, ask the authors.
“It would be a broad message of regulatory unpredictability, capable of contaminating the perception of the Brazilian business environment as a whole”, they conclude.
Who are the authors
José Francisco Manssur is a lawyer and worked on the fixed odds betting regulatory process from January 2023 to 2024.
Marcelo Damato is a journalist and worked on the regulatory process for fixed-odd betting from 2023 to January 2026.
