Two weeks ago, when a journalist asked me what the odds were of an online casino ban in Brazil, I said ’50:50′. I still think that is about right.
The government has been drafting a Medida Provisória [provisional decree] for three weeks and, as I write, there is still no text. The version leaking to the press would strike online casino games out of Law 14,790 while keeping sports betting and tightening advertising. Finance minister Dario Durigan says no decision has been taken, and his ministry is openly pushing for something softer.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said his “personal disposition” is to end betting altogether, then added that he will not make abrupt decisions. Twelve Série A football clubs and five state federations have signed a manifesto saying that if the regulated market ends, football ends. Everyone is shouting. Very few people are asking what actually happens if the harder version goes through. So let me.
The regulated market generated BRL37bn (£5.4bn) of GGR in 2025, about 20% more than the government itself forecast. The first half of 2026 came in at BRL20.1bn, up 15% on the same period last year. Federal tax collection was around BRL9bn to BRL10bn last year and BRL8.7bn in the first seven months of this year. There are 87 licensed operators that paid BRL30m each for a five-year licence, meaning the government secured more than BRL2.5bn in fees before a single bet was placed.
Is this a genuine policy or political theatre? Depending on who is counting, between 60% and 80% of that GGR is from igaming, not sports. Operators say it’s a 70:30 split. H2 Gambling Capital says closer to 60:40. Either way, a sportsbook-only licence in Brazil is a business with a third of its revenue and the same BRL30m fee, the same 13% GGR tax rising to 15%, the same 34% corporate tax, the same compliance stack. The maths does not make sense for most of the 87 licensees.
What happens to the other 70%? Brazil already ran this experiment for 80 years. Casinos were banned in 1946. Jogo do bicho, illegal since 1892, never stopped for a single day. Brazilians did not learn to gamble in January 2025. They learned to gamble at the bar counter, and the state spent a century pretending not to notice.
The offshore option
The offshore market did not disappear with regulation either. Estimates run from 30% to 50% on top of the regulated number. What changed is that Brazil built the best enforcement weapon any regulator has ever had. Pix. Some 96% of regulated gambling transactions run through it, every payment is tied to a CPF [individual taxpayer registry number], and the Central Bank can cut a payment provider off in a day. A casino ban hands those players back to the operators Pix cannot reach.
And be careful with the halfway house approach, because that is where the Ministry of Finance will try to land this. There is a version where nobody bans anything and the state redesigns the game instead: stake limits, spin timers, no autoplay, no bonus buys, slower reels.
Germany tried exactly that in 2021, with a €1 stake limit and a five second spin waiting time, and the result proved negative. The unlicensed sites kept offering the original games, the legal ones offered the watered-down version, and the player, who is not stupid, went where the product was.
Studios are not going to build a Brazil-only edition of every title for a market that reprices its rules each quarter. If the concern is gambling-related harms, the tools already exist on the player side: deposit and loss limits tied to income through Open Finance, the self-exclusion register, Sigap [the centralised government-run sector monitoring platform], and affordability checks. Regulate the wallet, not the game.
I understand the politics. Three out of four Brazilians tell pollsters they oppose betting. Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro who is challenging the incumbent at the general election in October, are a point or two apart in the run-off polls. A USP study claims betting “withdraws” BRL141bn a year from the economy, a figure that only makes sense if you count what is wagered rather than what is lost, since the entire regulated GGR is a quarter of that.
What is the industry’s fault is that after 20 months of a legal market it still speaks through five trade associations and has not found one argument that cuts through outside the sector. “Jobs and sponsorships” do not beat “my neighbour’s son lost his salary on Tigrinho”.
Making the case
Here is the argument that might. Those 87 companies paid BRL30m each for a five-year permit. They incorporated in Brazil, put up BRL30m of paid-in capital, certified their platforms to GLI standards, integrated Sigap, hired local teams and signed contracts with half the Série A. Remove the product that generates two-thirds of their revenue 20 months later and every one of them has a claim: breach of the permit, legitimate expectation, indirect expropriation, plus the suppliers and clubs downstream.
The state will spend years in court defending a decree written in three weeks. An investor looking at Brazilian oil, ports, telecomms or agriculture now has a fresh example of a federal licence being repriced or revoked by decree in the buildup to an election. If it can happen to the sector that paid BRL2.5bn in fees and roughly BRL18bn in taxes for the privilege of being legal, it can happen to anyone. For the companies that certified, complied and paid, it is hard to call it anything other than a bait-and-switch.
Let alone the reopening of the rate card every quarter. The GGR tax went from 12% to 13% in March, goes to 14% next year and 15% in 2028, with a Selective Tax on top from 2027 and no rate yet. Receita, Brazil’s tax authority, is now auditing the pre-2025 years that Congress refused to tax retroactively in February.
The frog is already in the pot. The question this week is whether Brasília turns the heat up or turns the stove off, and whether it understands that, either way, online casino does not go anywhere. It just stops being taxed.
Ramiro Atucha is CEO and founder of Atucha Strategic Advisory and a recognised leader in the global igaming sector. With nearly 20 years of industry experience, Atucha has played a pivotal role in shaping some of the sector’s most innovative businesses. He co-founded Leander Games in 2007, serving first as CEO and later as COO until 2019. In 2019, Atucha co-founded Vibra Gaming, a content and platform supplier specialised in the Latam market
The post Atucha Strategic Advisory: Brazil online casino ban would be a “bait-and-switch” for regulated operators first appeared on EGR Intel.
Market expert Ramiro Atucha explains that demand for igaming will remain and shift offshore should the government ban the vertical amid swirling rumours emerging from the nation
The post Atucha Strategic Advisory: Brazil online casino ban would be a “bait-and-switch” for regulated operators first appeared on EGR Intel.