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The Associação Nacional de Jogos e Loterias (ANJL) and Grupo Globo convened a seminar last week – “Desafios pós-regulamentação do mercado de apostas” – bringing together leading figures from Brazil’s betting industry to work through some of the thorniest questions facing the sector since regulation took effect: security, taxation, sporting integrity, and, centrally, how to protect bettors in a market that’s still working out how to apply its own safeguards consistently.
A direct response to prohibition talk
Much of the discussion centred on a threat the industry sees as more immediate than any single policy detail: growing political pressure to ban legalised betting companies outright. Bernardo Freire, ANJL’s legal counsel, didn’t mince words on the subject, describing any move to prohibit licensed operators as tantamount to enabling crime given the absence of any real justification, relevance or urgency behind the idea. His argument rested on a specific point: licensed operators already invest heavily in LGPD data-protection compliance, anti-money-laundering controls, and safeguards against underage access – protections that would simply disappear for the users pushed toward unlicensed platforms if the legal market were shut down.
With an estimated 40 per cent of the population already using illegal platforms, Freire warned that prohibition would risk pushing the remaining 60 per cent into that same unregulated space, stripping away the money-laundering, over-indebtedness and problem-gambling protections the licensed market currently provides.
ANJL president Plínio Lemos Jorge used his remarks to address what he described as a sustained campaign to discredit the sector, arguing that daily attacks on the industry’s reputation demand a direct, public response laying out what licensed operators actually do to meet their obligations. He pushed back specifically on data circulating in media coverage that he characterised as inaccurate, questioning the implication that Brazilian household debt problems only began in 2025 – a framing he argued doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and shouldn’t be allowed to stand unchallenged as the basis for policy decisions.
Why the venue matters
The pairing of ANJL with Grupo Globo – Brazil’s largest media conglomerate – is itself a notable signal: it puts the industry’s case directly in front of one of the country’s most influential broadcast and publishing platforms, at a moment when the sector’s public narrative is increasingly being contested in exactly those kinds of outlets. For an industry association whose stated priority is reducing the illegal market rather than fighting the existence of regulation itself, using a mainstream media partnership to make that argument publicly – rather than only through policy channels in Brasília – reflects a recognition that the debate over betting’s place in Brazilian society is playing out as much in public opinion as in Congress.
