The CBF demands tougher criminal penalties against illegal platforms
The Brazilian Football Confederation explicitly backed the regulated sports betting market and distanced itself from operators that continue to function outside the new regulatory framework. The entity's vice-president, Michelle Ramalho, brought this stance to the XIV Lisbon Forum in Portugal, where she participated in a panel dedicated to online gaming and its impact on the professional football industry.
The leader's message aimed to separate authorized bookmakers from the match-fixing cases that occasionally shake Brazilian and international football. For Ramalho, this association has become a media commonplace that harms the regulated sector and indirectly favors platforms operating outside of any control. The CBF vice-president unequivocally stated the need to demystify the idea that legal operators are responsible for match-fixing scandals.
An explicit defense of legalized operators
Ramalho's intervention was one of the most forceful known from the top echelons of Brazilian football in favor of regulation. The leader maintained that today, professional football cannot be conceived without betting, a phrase that summarizes the economic weight the segment has acquired within the sport's ecosystem. Her interpretation is that authorized companies, far from jeopardizing the integrity of competitions, are frequent victims of campaigns that associate them with illegal practices largely perpetrated by unlicensed platforms.
This diagnosis opens the door to a more demanding regulatory approach. The CBF demands that the activity of bookmakers offering bets without authorization from the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting be criminalized. For Ramalho, current Brazilian legislation lacks severe tools to deter and sanction these actors, which creates unfair competition with those who have assumed the regulatory, fiscal, and compliance costs to enter the new market.
Demands to Congress
The leader went beyond the denunciation and sent a direct message to Congress. The CBF understands that strengthening the regulated market largely depends on increasing pressure on the clandestine segment, whether through harsher criminal sanctions, effective blockages, or civil liabilities that discourage illegal operation. The argument is economic as well as regulatory: if authorized operators cannot compete on equal terms, the industry's tax base itself is at risk.
The proposal also has a sporting aspect. The CBF arrived at the Lisbon Forum with the concrete possibility of being formalized as the sports organization responsible for overseeing the integrity of competitions under Decree 12.560/2025. This authority gives the entity scope to articulate with legal operators market monitoring actions, information exchange, and detection of suspicious patterns—tools that are only viable with regulated bookmakers that accept audits and share transactional data.
The regional mirror
The Brazilian debate serves as a barometer for all of Latin America. In Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, sports federations are still digesting coexistence with online betting and discussing their degree of involvement in oversight. The CBF's move reinforces an idea gaining consensus in the region: turning sports and its leadership into active allies of the regulated market, not just simple recipients of sponsorship income. If Brazil consolidates this model, it pressures the rest of the Latin American markets to define more sophisticated cooperation mechanisms between regulators, leagues, and licensed operators in the face of the permanent advance of illegal gambling.
Tags: Brazil, CBF, Brazil gambling regulation, LatAm sports betting, illegal operators, sports integrity