For Karen, it started with an ad and an influencer. Next came a 30 reais (€5, $5.80) bet. Then shame, spiraling debts, using her mum’s credit card and a battle against addiction that, though calmed for now, still rages.
“If I was at a party, I’d be gambling. If I went to a restaurant or a bar, my cell phone would be in my hand. Even taking a shower, my cell phone would be in my hand. Under the shower, my arm stretched out,” the 29-year-old from the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, told DW.
She struggles to get a real handle on her losses, but she knows it runs to several thousand reais more than she can afford to pay back. “The credit card companies call every day,” said Karen, who asked to withhold her last name as most of her family is still not aware of the issue.
While gambling addiction is an increasingly serious issue in countries across the globe, from the USA and Germany to China, stories like Karen’s are part of a spike in problem gambling in Brazil. The South American country legalized online gambling in late-2018 but made no effort to legislate against its harms or its advertising until January 2025. Researchers and mental health professionals have reported an increase in cases of online betting addiction, especially among lower-income Brazilians.
An indicator of gambling’s grip on the country is that beneficiaries of Bolsa Familia, the basic income offered by the Federal Government to poor citizens, spent approximately R$3 billion on online gambling last year, according to data from the Central Bank of Brazil. The amount equates to 20% of all the benefits paid by the program.
A 2023 study by the Federal University of Sao Paulo found that 6% of the Brazilian population say they bet on online sports betting websites (equivalent to about 9 million people) and 67% of those are ‘risky gamblers’ – not people who necessarily have an addiction, but that display reckless behaviors such as betting more than they can afford to lose.
Gambling has also embedded itself in the country’s national pastime and obsession — football — with the same study showing that online sports betting, driven by football, is the second most popular way to gamble in Brazil, just behind the state-run lotteries.
Analysis from the DW data team further shows that six out of every ten advertising boards that surrounded the pitch during the 2024 season of the Brazilian football league showed ads for sports betting or other types of gambling – a figure that rose to 7 in 10 during the final match day.
Gambling ads flood Brazilian football
Five years ago, a wide range of economic sectors appeared in Brazilian league advertising boards: banks, gas stations, airlines, pharmaceutical companies, retail stores and media networks were almost always visible around the pitch. Now it’s all about Superbet, Betano, PixBet, or BetNacional. In comparison to 2019, the first season after gambling was legalized, the share of pitchside ads featuring gambling companies has now doubled.
Those figures come from an analysis carried out by the DW data team, which used an artificial intelligence model to detect, classify, and count advertising hoardings displayed in league matches between 2019 and 2024.
The investigation was carried out using footage from highlight reels available on YouTube. More details on the methodology are available in this public repository.
The data also reveals that about 70% of the ads shown pitchside in the final round of the 2024 Brazilian Championship were from betting or gambling companies. It outstripped the next highest, Colombia’s top flight, by 16%, and is more than double of top European leagues such as Italy’s Serie A and the Premier League, in England.
Clubs grow dependent on gambling sponsorships
Some countries with longer-established sports betting markets have started to implement curbs on advertising. In 2021, Spain, for example, banned betting and gambling companies from displaying advertising during prime-time broadcasts of sporting events, as well as preventing clubs from signing sponsorship contracts.
English top flight clubs will no longer be permitted to have gambling logos on their shirt fronts from the 2026-27 season, though pitchside ads will remain. In Brazil, all 20 first-division clubs currently display at least one gambling sponsor on their kits, and 90% have them front and center, according to Brazilian outlet GloboEsporte.
The extent to which Brazilian clubs now rely on the gambling industry became clear when a bill was proposed to drastically reduce such advertising in May 2025.
A joint statement signed by more than 50 clubs, including those currently playing at the FIFA Club World Cup (Palmeiras, Flamengo, Fluminense and Botafogo), said the bill would see a combined loss of R$1.6bn (approximately $310m). “Such limitations, if not adjusted, will result in the financial collapse of the entire sports ecosystem — especially Brazilian football,” it warned, while also acknowledging the need for some further regulation.
‘It’s like something is poking inside your head’
The impacts of advertising on both gamblers and non-gamblers is clear to Dr Jamie Torrance, a lecturer and researcher in psychology at Swansea University, in the UK. He told DW that the fact that bookmakers spend billions worldwide on advertising, both in sports and other areas, proves how effective they believe it to be.
“Embedding these brands into a game that people care about, that they’re emotionally invested in, there’s a classical conditioning paradigm at play. People have these emotional ties to the sport and the gambling companies also want them to have these emotional ties to their gambling brand as well,” he says. The same, he added, is true of influencers and celebrities — a marketing tactic that is not limited to the sporting realm.
Karen said it certainly worked on her. Her betting was focused on ‘Fortune Tiger’, a virtual slot machine game that was promoted by social media personalities she followed. Though she didn’t come across it through football, the major companies that appear on hoardings and kits also offer the same game.
“An influencer posted a simple game, and I clicked on it out of curiosity. The first time I bet R$30 , without success, and I thought that was stupid”, she said. “But a few months went by, and a friend told me she was playing, so I searched for it again. After that, Instagram became hell. I was always seeing posts, always seeing people promoting it. That’s when I started digging myself a hole.”
Once the addiction took hold, she couldn’t escape prompts to gamble. “As somebody with this addiction, when you see a video or someone posting a win, it’s like something is poking inside your head: ‘What if I put in some money? What if I try again?'”
Years without oversight led to public health crisis
Karen says she started realizing the scale of her gambling problem when she came across an online support group run by psychologist Rafael Avila and his Associacao de Protecao e Apoio ao Jogador (Association for the Protection and Support of Gamblers).
Avila runs a free service for hundreds of addicted gamblers. He told DW that outside of the major cities, there is almost no help for people in Karen’s position. He feels the lack of any serious legislation when gambling was legalized has led to a crisis. “The government is not investing the amount they need to solve the problem. They are now trying to solve it, but it needed to happen six years ago,” he said.
The situation only changed in early 2025, when new legislation came into effect. The regulation currently in place, however, focuses mostly on taxation and in the proper registration of gambling companies with the Brazilian authorities. Ads remained largely unchanged but for the fact that companies now had to display warnings about responsible gambling, much like alcohol products, and couldn’t promote gambling as a source of income.
Congress seeks tougher regulation
The IBJR, the industry body which represents 75% of the gambling operators in Brazil told DW that the recent changes were already having an effect. “The regulation, in force since January 2025, marked a new beginning for the sector, with clear rules that offer adequate mechanisms for the promotion of responsible gaming,” they said in a statement.
The Brazilian Congress, however, is currently discussing the tougher regulation on ads opposed by the clubs, including a ban on gambling advertisement during event broadcasts. Appearances from famous people, such as professional athletes and artists, would also be prohibited.
The proposed law has already passed through the Senate. To come into effect, it must now be approved by the lower house and signed off by the president. Its contents can still change in the process – and the text that was approved on the Senate floor was already a watered-down version of the original proposal, which called for a full ban on any kind of gambling advertisement.
For Karen, and countless others like her, this will be too little too late. Through her work with Avila and other addicts, and her strategy of not keeping any money online, she has avoided gambling for about a month. But she’s been here before and relapsed. Something that started as a bit of fun with little at stake has taken over her life.
Edited by: Kalika Mehta
