Betting sites have until January 31 to start paying clubs, confederations, and athletes for the use of their brands and names by online betting and gaming sites. This deadline is stated in Ordinance 1,092 of the Ministry of Finance, published on January 13, 2025. However, the operators of these games question this deadline and point out practical difficulties in starting the payments by the end of the month.
According to José Francisco Manssur, partner at CSMV Lawyers, since 2018, when fixed-odds sports betting began to proliferate in Brazil, Law No. 13,756/18 already anticipated this transfer. However, to date, the payments have not been made due to lack of regulation.
"Law No. 14,790/23 reaffirmed the obligation of the transfer. And what the ordinance established is that this counterpart must start being paid by January 31," stated Manssur, who was at the forefront of drafting the rules for the fixed-odds betting sector in Brazil as a special advisor to the Executive Secretariat of the Ministry of Finance, in 2023.
"This initiative will address a situation that had been very poorly resolved for many years, where clubs handed over their names, symbols, and the athletes themselves to be used by betting sites and received absolutely nothing in return," he said.
The regulation stipulates that, after deducting the payments of prizes to bettors, the bets retain 88% of the collected amount. The remaining 12% is allocated to various areas, such as social security, education, and sports.
Of these 12%, the percentage allocated to sports will be 36%, with the majority (7.3%) directed to entities that make up the National Sports System, which includes clubs, confederations, and athletes. The law also provides 2.2% to the COB (Brazilian Olympic Committee), 1.3% to the CPB (Brazilian Paralympic Committee), and 0.7% to the CBC (Brazilian Committee of Clubs).
According to Manssur, the distribution of the values among each entity will be proportional to the volume of bets made involving certain confederations and/or athletes.
"The ordinance created by the SPA/MF [Secretariat of Prizes and Bets of the Ministry of Finance] represents an important step for the development of sports. Sports betting generates billions of reais annually, and this allocation of resources will certainly open up new investment opportunities in the sector," said Paulo Maciel, president of the CBC (Brazilian Committee of Clubs).
The ordinance provides that the bets have the possibility to create a non-profit association responsible for centralizing all payments and making the transfers to the entities.
"Today we already see this, for example, in relation to musical copyright rights. Ecad [Central Office of Collection and Distribution] is a private association responsible for monitoring, collecting, and distributing values related to copyright rights to the authors. What the ordinance aims to encourage is the creation of a similar association to manage the transfers by the operators to the clubs and athletes," stated Raphael Paçó Barbieri, partner at CCLA Lawyers, who works with sports law.
The bets, unsurprisingly, are hesitant. Legal consultant of the ANJL (National Association of Games and Lotteries), Bernardo Cavalcanti Freire advocates for an extension of the deadline imposed by the ordinance for the start of payments to accommodate the bets.
"It will be necessary to create structural mechanisms by January 31. It is unfeasible for the operators, besides imposing a burden on them. The deadline needs to be extended, this is essential. And there is also a vacuum, as there are competitions that have already started, such as the state ones," said Freire.
Source: UOL
