Lula bans fixed-odds sports betting week before Brazilian election

On a Friday morning in São Paulo, less than two weeks before Brazilians would cast their first votes in a presidential election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed an executive order that would shut down fixed-odds sports betting across the country. The ban was immediate. It prohibited the operation, offering, intermediation, and advertising of these platforms. Existing users had until October 5 to withdraw their money. New deposits were blocked at once. The order would need congressional approval within 120 days to survive, but Lula had moved first and moved fast.

The president framed the decision in stark terms. "I made the decision to take a hard, drastic and necessary measure," he told journalists. "It's like cancer, you take out the tumour, or the tumour will kill us." He had been building toward this moment for months. In April, he had called for a ban. At the UN General Assembly earlier that week, he accused the betting industry of "transforming addiction into profit" and "destroying homes." The language was not measured. It was the language of someone who saw a public health crisis.

The numbers supported his alarm. Brazilians were spending roughly 30 billion reais—about £5.6 billion—on bets each month, according to the central bank. A 2025 study by the Institute of Studies for Health Policies calculated that betting and gambling cost Brazilian society 38.8 billion reais annually and correlated with increases in suicide and depression. The industry had grown explosively since Brazil opened its doors to online betting in 2018 under President Michel Temer. It snowballed under Jair Bolsonaro. By the time Lula took office, fixed-odds sports betting alone generated more than $4 billion in annual revenue in Brazil, making it one of the world's largest markets for the product. Some of that money was coming from the country's poorest citizens—the government had only recently blocked welfare recipients enrolled in the Bolsa Familia cash-transfer program from using betting platforms.

Lula's government had already tried to regulate the sector. In December 2023, he signed a law to tax betting companies for the first time. Months later, his administration blocked more than 2,000 irregular betting websites, some of them linked to organized crime groups including the First Capital Command and the Red Command. But regulation had not slowed the tide. The addiction persisted. Families fell into debt. The president concluded that the only answer was elimination.

The timing raised questions. The election was eight days away. Polls suggested the ban enjoyed broad public support among Brazilians, and Lula's main rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, immediately accused him of an "electoral measure"—a political calculation dressed up as principle. Bolsonaro's Liberal party had previously struck down a Lula order for tax hikes on betting and virtual casinos, so the accusation carried some weight. Yet the public health case was real, documented, and years in the making. Whether the timing was opportunistic or simply the moment when political will finally aligned with necessity remained a matter of interpretation.

The ban created an immediate crisis for Brazilian football. Major clubs had received warnings from betting companies that sponsorships would end if the government moved against the industry. The clubs sounded the alarm, claiming the move could end Brazilian football itself—a claim that drew mockery on social media in a country where football is woven into the national identity. But Lula's government had decided that the cost to families and to public health outweighed the cost to sports revenue. The order was signed. The platforms had 120 days to find out whether Congress would let it stand.