GMB - Tell us a little about your career in Sports Law...
Victor Targino - I have always tried to direct my career towards entertainment, especially sports and games of chance. While still in graduation, I published some works dedicated to the regulation of casinos in Brazil and the regulatory approach to the jogo do bicho and its intrinsic relationship to Brazilian culture, but I decided that the objective would be to enter the sports industry. I completed a Post Graduation in Sports Law in 2015, the year I started working at Corinthians, more specifically in Labor Law applied to Sports.
In 2016, I won the Valed Perry Award, from the Brazilian Institute of Sports Law, with a monograph focused on the development of Handball in Brazil (suggesting the application of the model of the hybrid sports entity - Single-Entity, as originally adopted by Major League Soccer, in the USA). In 2018, I completed the Master in Sports Management in Spain, at ISDE, and in early 2019 I was invited to work at Santos Futebol Clube, where I stayed until October 2020, when I migrated to eSports (Netshoes Miners). In the same year, I decided to resume research on the regulation of betting and gambling and published a paper commenting on the Sports Betting Law in Brazil.
In early 2021, I published an article in India, co-authored with Jaya Suri Phalpher, drawing parallels between legislation and sports betting scenarios in both countries. Today, I am part of the Sports Betting Center of the National Academy of Sports Law.
The sports betting regulation project has undergone some adjustments, such as the change in the taxation. Is this considered an advance for the development of the betting market in Brazil?
I have no doubt that the change in the taxation of betting was very positive for the future development of the market in Brazil. Replacing the original wording of the law (which taxed the entire product = Turnover) for taxation by the GGR (Gross-Gaming Revenue, that is, taxation after deducting paid prizes) represents an enormous adjustment to the business model seen globally as more attractive to operators. A colleague who I believe anticipated this need was Udo Seckelmann, a Brazilian lawyer who signaled in an academic article some time ago that the GGR would bring to Brazil "the best international practices (such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Denmark)", quoting, in the opportunity that Portugal would be experiencing difficulties in combating illegal gambling due to the affiliation to the Turnover model. So it's a breakthrough.
What other points in the betting regulation project do you believe should be changed?
Both the law and the regulatory project will deserve improvements. It will be up to the sector's stakeholders, as soon as regulation takes place, to identify, signal and propose the necessary improvements, as the activity develops. Now, with the exception of Turf, Brazil turned a blind eye to the gambling and betting market for almost one century, so we are way behind the rest of the world in several aspects, such as in the formation of a responsible gaming culture , in the refining of regulatory and inspection practices, or even in the creation of jurisprudence based on daily disputes. Let's imagine, for example, if a minor enters a house, makes a bet and wins. The operator will not want to pay, claiming that the contract is void. At the same time, the operator was negligent in letting the minor enter the place, spending and earning. And if he hadn't won, would he have paid the money back? If we can say so, everything is relatively new in Brazil, so there will certainly be a lot of room for modifications and improvements.
In order not to be on the fence, however, some sensitive points could have been better addressed by the legislator and will deserve great care by the regulatory body:
(i) the fight against ludopathy (gambling addiction) through the publication of public policies for harm reduction, which is often called abroad as "responsible gaming".
(ii) establish and demand high standards of governance and transparency from companies interested in exploring the sector, through a concession model (since it allows the imposition of contractual obligations on concessionaires, whose non-compliance will lead to the revocation of the license), in order to to curb and rebuke the segment's association with money laundering and currency evasion.
With the current scenario, do you think that the Brazilian betting industry will attract international business groups and will also open the way for the national ones to be able to itself among the big ones?
Brazilian culture has always been very used to gambling and betting, either because of the hope of obtaining abrupt riches, in a dream of social ascension, or because the formation of our society had a lot of Latin influence, especially Portuguese and Spanish, and North American, places where gambling and betting have been part of popular culture for centuries. History shows us that times of total prohibition have always alternated with times of total tolerance (legal deregulation or absence of practical repression; even if it is a criminal misdemeanor, the jogo do bicho is easily played and little repressed in Brazil). In this mix of ups and downs, there was room for legislative exceptions, such as lotteries, explored in Portugal by Santa Casa de Misericórdia since the 18th century and in Brazil by Caixa Econômica Federal since the 1970s, as a perfect proof that even in In times of prohibition, gambling and betting remain so deeply rooted in popular culture that something has to be regulated by the Government.
Thus, the enormous potential that Brazil has, both for its culture and for its continental dimension, will certainly attract foreign investment without this proving to be predatory on Brazilian business. The stability and development of the sector depend, however, on the interest of the government in curbing or making illegality unfeasible, creating mechanisms to block and repress illegal and/or foreign-based houses, websites and applications, in addition to establishing a effective regulatory system to avoid harmful competitive practices or manipulation of sports results, for example.
In the second quarter of this year, the IBIA reported five cases of suspicious betting in South America, all of them related to Brazil (4 in football and 1 in tennis). Will industry regulations encourage the creation of sporting integrity supervisory bodies that inhibit cases like these?
Although the preservation of sporting integrity is already of great interest to all stakeholders involved in the sport (clubs, fans, leagues, federations, sponsors, broadcasting companies, etc.), undoubtedly the regulation of betting here will positively add to the efforts in the fight against match-fixing. In other words, it is another economic segment that will be interested in dialoguing with the authorities in order to implement and improve mechanisms for preserving sports fairness.
Can Brazil become a power in sports betting? Why?
It is already. Even with the segment absolutely unregulated (Law 13.765/18, enacted almost three years ago, still awaits the long-awaited regulation), Brazil is already emerging as a giant in the Latin American market. There is research from 2020 indicating that the Brazilian betting market moves more than R$ 1 billion per year. The factors are diverse, from the continental dimension, already mentioned, as the cultural ones (not only the game and the bet are part of the culture, but the sport is completely intrinsic to the Brazilian society). Who has never been faced with the question "which team do you support?" or "let's make a Cup sweepstakes?". Cheering and betting are very close behaviors, which affect our emotions from our most primitive sensations. And our parents and grandparents, in a way, got us used to dealing with it as part of our daily lives. The press and the most diverse Brazilian business sectors, too.
What is your view on Bill383 on regulating eSports in Brazil through federations and confederations that have no link with the market in question? Do you believe this is the best way to regulate electronic sports?
The creation of figures without any community link with the segment, just with the aim of copying the old traditional sports model and/or establishing a political, class-based regulation on a private economic activity cannot be the best way. On the contrary, Bill383 approach respectfully hurts the origin of eSports, which emerged from the very close relationship between game developers and/or publishers (private companies with a desire to profit) and their communities of players eager to attribute competitive nature to what was initially a recreational practice or mere leisure. And this competitive level, organized by the developers or publishers themselves, proved to be extremely profitable. It is, in the beginning, a business model, something totally different from what originated the contemporary traditional sport, whose roots emerged from the association of people (not for profit) interested in a specific sport. And these people started to create associations to bring together practitioners at a national level, then at an international level, in order to standardize the rules and make competitions between people from different locations viable.
In other words: each eSports modality is a product, it is a game, it is a business of a certain developer or publisher. Many of these games compete with each other because they are part of the same genre and/or reach the same target audience. It is illogical to conceive of a sports federation encompassing competing products. And it is not economically reasonable to create a federation for each game (as if EA Sports' NBA Live had one federation and 2kSports' NBA 2k competitor had another; or the same federation). The segment would become onerous, rigid and, in practice, would make the business model proposed by the respective developers or publishers unfeasible.
Source: Exclusive GMB
