My father bet on the ‘jogo do bicho’ every day. On Saturdays, as we were walking to buy bread in the morning, he analyzed my dreams with Freudian seriousness. In the absence of an animal, it drew a guess of some detail, among which I struggled to remember. When in doubt, the bet went to the thousands of his registration with the OAB (7796), and a change for the receipt printed on the ticket where the scorer wrote down the game.
I found it fascinating, although at 2 pm, when I was pedaling eager to see the result glued to the pole in front of the bakery, reality almost always frustrated the expectation. He gave an ostrich, or dog, or cat, or donkey, or any other animal other than that discovered scientifically during the morning walk. When we won, I came back proud of paying the prize.
The gain was always little, it fit in the pocket. We never hit the thousand in the head, which would pay four thousand times the bet. My father always "surrounded" his bets for the five thousand drawn, "reversed" the order of numbers and played in the "group". The ten cruzeiros (former Brazilian currency) were diluted. It wasn't a game to get rich. It was a habit, a hobby, a playful dose of hope, a pleasure in the process, not in the result.
These reminiscences came to mind when I read, last week, the news of the investigation, by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Goiás, of a scandal of proportions not yet completely mapped, involving the manipulation of results of football games in Brazil, by bettors and players. The version is new, but the fact repeats itself from time to time, here and abroad.
The event revived the call for state regulation of sports betting. In fact, as I have already written in this space (World Cup, bets and coins, 12/01/22), we live in Brazil in make-believe. Banking for games or bets without legal authorization – including the jogo do bicho – remains, in theory, illegal. But Law 13,756 created, in 2018, “fixed-odds bets” on “real sports-themed events”, to formalize this market here.
It turns out that the regulation of the law to date has not come, even after the text was changed to favour betting operators. As we see in the shirts of the clubs and in the ads on the edge of the pitches, the betting sites are the main sponsors of Brazilian football, but they are still organized outside Brazil. Around here they get the bets and pay the prizes, but they don't want to settle in the country.
At first, companies that exploit the bets should be the biggest interested in avoiding fraud as found by the Public Prosecutor's Office in the B series of the Brazilian championship. After all, in theory, if bettors start to believe that the results are manipulated, they can stop betting, or at least restrict their bets to events less subject to manipulation.
It is true that the case of Goiás may reveal a certain lack of concern on the part of bettors with the seriousness of the game. The rigged bet involved the number of penalties committed in the first half of any three matches out of the ten scheduled for the day. A scenario in which sports odds were far less important than mere chance, and a design that was a dish made to encourage fraud.
But what matters is that the companies that finance the game can, if they want, restrict the types of bets that do not involve sports elements, limiting the players' access to a stricter menu of events, such as the result of the matches, the placement of the clubs in the championships or of the top scorers.
What makes no sense is to expect state regulation to fulfill this role limiting the type of bet. It will be impossible for the government to anticipate and clearly define the hypotheses in which manipulation will take place. Not to mention the risk of bettors starting to believe that bets are regulated by the government, and thus protected from manipulation.
For this reason, a state regulation regarding the range of accepted bets should, at most, require companies not to accept bets that facilitate the manipulation of results and make them responsible if their procedures and regulations prove to be inappropriate and condescending. With a great chance, in any case, that the market will continue to function outside of State supervision.
It's just that, as in the ‘jogo do bicho’, sports bets are of small value and prizes are paid immediately – by PIX, as before they were made in cash by the operator himself. The bank's reputation comes precisely from the speed of payment and the absence of defaults. Neither the banker nor the gambler miss the presence of the state.
On the other hand, it is unreasonable to expect that the Brazilian State will sit idly by in the face of events such as those investigated by the Public Ministry of Goiás. These are crimes of embezzlement and conspiracy, involving the sport that is the national passion.
In this scenario, everything indicates that the most effective state action would be to adopt measures that improve the detection of fraud and the effectiveness of its repression. For this, firstly, it is necessary to improve criminal and sports sanctions against players and managers involved in the commission of illicit acts, and to speed up the imposition of those penalties, inhibiting the commission of crimes by increasing the risk of their practice.
However, given the high probability that betting operators will continue to operate abroad, it is also necessary to intensify the international exchange of information by Brazilian anti-money laundering bodies, including with regard to technology and the joint investigation of fraud linked to sports betting.
Marcelo Trindade
Lawyer and professor at PUC-RIO. He was director and chairman of the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM).
Source: Valor Investe
