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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ordered a sweeping prohibition on online gambling, announcing a ban on sports betting and internet casinos barely a week before Brazilian voters go to the polls in a presidential contest he is fighting to win a fourth term.
The left-wing leader signed a provisional order on Friday that, in his words, "prohibits all sports betting and online casinos". The decree also bars new deposits into existing betting accounts, and gives punters and bookmakers until 5 October to withdraw any funds already held in online accounts. Under Brazil's constitution, such provisional measures must be ratified by Congress within 120 days if they are to remain in force — meaning Lula's opponents on the largely right-leaning legislature will get an opportunity to block or amend the ban.
Separately, Lula signed a bill establishing criminal offences connected to fixed-odds betting, the format that accounts for the vast majority of online sports wagering in Brazil. Taken together, the measures amount to one of the strictest national crackdowns on licensed online betting anywhere in the world, and they arrive while the industry is still expanding at extraordinary speed.
That growth is the context for the decision. Fixed-odds betting and online casinos were legalised in 2018, during the presidency of Michel Temer, and have since taken hold with a speed few observers predicted. At the same time, most forms of gambling remain illegal in Brazil — casinos, slot machines and traditional card games are prohibited — meaning the surge in legal wagering is concentrated almost entirely in the one grey-to-legal zone the country created eight years ago.
Lula framed the crackdown in moral and economic terms, describing the sector as a "cancer" in Brazilian society and warning that "either we remove the tumour, or it kills us". He said he had received accounts from families who had sold everything they owned — houses, possessions — to fund gambling habits. At the United Nations General Assembly earlier in the week, the president accused the industry of "turning addiction into profit", and he repeated in a post on X that the government would not permit betting companies to cash in on the income and lives of Brazilian families.
A central plank of his argument is that Brazil allowed the market to grow without the safeguards other regulators require. Lula acknowledged that online betting was permitted under Temer's administration but said it had expanded "without regulation under Bolsonaro's management". He claimed there were effectively no restrictions on who could sign up — and no meaningful barriers stopping children and teenagers from accessing betting platforms.
The timing of the announcement is difficult to separate from electoral arithmetic. Lula, 80, is seeking another term in a race against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the incarcerated former president Jair Bolsonaro, and recent polling puts the two candidates almost level. The first round of the presidential election is just over a week away.
The younger Bolsonaro immediately alleged political opportunism. Speaking at a campaign rally in Rio de Janeiro on Friday, according to Reuters, he called the crackdown "populist, hypocritical and politically motivated", and accused his rival of playing politics with the issue rather than acting out of concern for public health.
Industry groups dispute that the ban serves anyone's interests. The Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gaming, a trade body representing around 75% of the domestic betting sector, said a total prohibition on fixed-odds betting would jeopardise the entire industry and put 58bn to 73bn reais in revenue at risk. The IBJR also warned that prohibition would not remove demand: punters who migrate to unlicensed operators would lose access to the consumer-protection mechanisms — dispute resolution, self-exclusion tools, limits on deposits — that exist in the regulated market, leaving them more exposed to fraud and harm.
Football clubs are among the loudest opponents. Grêmio, one of the so-called "big twelve" clubs, said ahead of the announcement that sports betting companies had become "one of the main sources of revenue for sports" since wagering was legalised. The club warned that changing the law "will not only be an open door for illegal betting, but a fatal blow to Brazilian football, leading many clubs to insolvency".
The financial stakes are substantial. Broadcasters report that the leading clubs collected 1.1bn Brazilian reais from betting sponsors in 2025 — roughly $212m (£160m) — while the industry as a whole took in 62.5bn reais in the same period. A ban on advertising and sponsorship arrangements, which is expected to follow the wagering prohibition, would therefore strip a significant share of that income from teams that have already faced repeated financial crises.
Public opinion appears to be on Lula's side. A survey published this week by Atlas and Bloomberg found that 59.9% of Brazilian adults support banning internet betting, suggesting the president has a sizeable mandate for a move of this kind even if the economic consequences for clubs, operators and state revenues are unclear.
What happens next depends heavily on Congress. If legislators approve the provisional order within 120 days, Brazil will join a growing list of countries — including much of Europe — that have chosen prohibition over licensing. If they reject it, the industry's finances and football's sponsorship base remain largely intact. Either way, the decision is likely to be a defining issue of the closing days of the campaign, and a test of whether a president seeking a historic fourth term can convert a popular moral cause into lasting policy.
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