Already established in Brazil as a great supporter of sports, with emphasis on sponsoring the Brasileirão Series A, galera.bet will start accepting, from January 2024, bets on rodeos.
With the football market already flooded with around a thousand betting sites vying for the attention of fans willing to place their bets, one of the main players in this segment in Brazil understood that the time has come to diversify the business and be present in other arenas.
"There are already people doing this, but irregularly and in smaller rodeos. The sites are so small that the odds are manually adjusted as bets arrive," says the CEO of galera.bet, Marcos Sabiá.
Sabiá, however, recognizes that the undertaking involves a certain risk, precisely because almost no one does it and also because there is little information that allows the size of the potential audience to be estimated. Even in countries where there is already a more mature rodeo betting market — such as the United States and Canada — there is little open data from those who operate, which also makes any type of projection for Brazil difficult.
What encourages galera.bet to make this bet is the country culture that is rooted in Brazil, not only due to the rodeos and ‘vaquejadas’ that are popular in the interior, but also due to the success of the songs and the money that agribusiness generates. "There are around 70 million people who live the agricultural lifestyle and country culture. Not by chance, there is always country music in the top 5 most listened to on Spotify," he highlights.
galera.bet, which currently has 3 million users on its platform, will be the first Playtech brand to enter this segment. In Brazil, there are around 100 rodeos that are organized by the PBR, the main international league in the category. As part of the plan to join this market, galera.bet decided to be a master sponsor of the Circuito Sertanejo, which includes the Barretos party, the largest in the country, bringing together 1 million people per year. This is a similar strategy to that adopted in football, as the brand sponsors Series A.
By entering rodeos, the company's idea is not only to diversify the operation, but also to reinforce its positioning as an entertainment and fun business, and not just betting. Furthermore, it wants the rodeo audience to have galera.bet as their preferred platform for betting on any sport, differentiating itself from the many others that mark the fierce competition in football. "The guy who goes to the rodeo also has a favorite team and will also bet on the games."
The flood of bets that appear in football, in fact, has already caused problems for galera.bet that go beyond the fight for attendance. The platform is fighting a legal battle with the CBF to enforce its exclusive sponsorship contract in Series A, because the confederation even included other brands in advertising pieces that should only have galera.bet.
The platforms have invested so much in advertising that only one of the 40 teams that are part of the first and second division, Cuiabá, does not have a website as a sponsor on the uniform. The advance, driven by a law at the end of 2018 that opened the doors to this market, led the Chamber to approve another law this year to create regulation, which will still pass through the Senate.
One of the most relevant measures is the imposition of a fee of R$30 million on sites to be able to operate, which should remove smaller platforms from the market, which do not have the cash to do so, leaving only the largest in the race, such as galera.bet, which will continue to have football as its most important market. The entry barrier, in fact, could help the company led by Sabiá have an easier path to consolidating itself in the rodeo market.
Before that, however, the company is facing the challenge of building a long database of past rodeos that will allow it to create algorithms that calculate prizes with the highest possible level of accuracy in relation to the odds, and updated automatically. If this is already well understood in football, in rodeos there is still a legacy of statistics to be built. The work began months ago and involves game science experts from Insper and UFPE.
The most sensitive part, however, will be creating mechanisms that prevent manipulation, an issue that gained strength with the Parliamentary Commission of Investigation (CPI) that investigates cases involving football players. Just as on grass there are bets that involve facts that can be easily manipulated by a single person — such as a yellow card —, in rodeos there are situations as simple as deciding whether the rider will fall prematurely or not.
To prevent problems like these, galera.bet intends to use techniques that are already used in football, such as knowing in depth the athletes' history, to understand when there is something that is out of the ordinary for that professional and could represent evidence of manipulation, and monitor unusual movements of money on the platform. "It is in our interest to prevent these things from happening, because if there is manipulation, it is the platform that loses money."
Source: Pipeline / Valor
