Brazil, part 1: The road to 2025 regulation – entertainment

Ahead of Brazil regulating sports betting in January 2025 and in partnership with ENV Media, OddsMatrix has conducted an extensive player behaviour survey with more than 1,800 sports bettors across Brazil.

We will present our findings across five key themes: entertainment, localisation, brand, loyalty and cross-sell, coverage and features. 

In part one of this series analysing the results of the survey, we focus on entertainment. Here, we will explore how well-versed players already are in online betting, how they discover sites and offers, as well as their habits and preferences, including their favourite sports, leagues, teams, bets and more. 

A large, young, connected audience who know what they want

Brazil’s sports bettors are ahead of the curve for a soon-to-be-regulated online gambling market. They are already highly active online and on mobile, with social media and streaming front and centre.

From a ‘select all that apply option’ on the survey*, 49% of respondents selected social media as their first choice, followed by online advertisements (47%). This shows how these are the two most popular discovery channels for online betting in Brazil.

More than two-thirds (66%) of players said they engage with betting content on mainstream social media such as Instagram, Facebook and X, 33% use mobile messenger apps like Telegram and WhatsApp, and 31% on short-form video platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Kwai.

More than half (51%) of participants said live streaming games directly from operator sites is an ‘expected’ means of consuming content, followed by real-time statistics and analysis (42%). This suggests the audience operators face in January will be sharper bettors than most and will be eager to engage with as much live, relevant, low-latency, on-demand content as possible. 

The key betting drivers in Brazil

We all expect Brazilians to bet on their own leagues and their favourite footballers in the famous gold and blue strip, right? Yes and no. Of course, they love to bet on their domestic competitions. However, the betting world today is more global than ever and, with such an educated and bet-savvy audience as this, the story is multi-layered.

Nearly half of players (43%) are influenced to bet by their favourite teams or competitions. Sponsorships and partnerships with popular teams enhance brand loyalty, while promoting partnerships and offering team-specific promotions attract dedicated fans.

The most popular sports betting leagues overall are the Brazilian Serie A (71% selected as first choice), the UEFA Champions League (48%), the World Cup (40%) and the Copa América (38%), while NBA basketball (21%) and the NFL (11%) are among the fastest growing.

As for international betting competitions, Serie A (56%), the Spanish La Liga (44%) and English Premier League (44%) make up the top three and are followed with a growing interest in the women’s Brazilian championship (28%), Brazilian volleyball super league (24%) and National Futsal League (17%).

Some 40% of players bet equally on international versus local games, while nearly half (49%) value localisation ‘highly’, suggesting that localising themes and markets enhances user satisfaction and engagement, while offering localised content and promotions attracts more regular users.

Close to 60% considered it ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to have good betting options on more ‘niche’ Brazilian sports such as beach football or volleyball, while localised bonuses and promotions (60%) as well as live Portuguese-language games (49%) are top of bettors’ preferences.

[*Data provided is from 1,800 regular sports betting players across Brazil. If totals are above 100%, this is due to multiple choice questions that include a “select all that apply” response.]

OddsMatrix – how we bridge the entertainment gap

OddsMatrix covers these areas and much more, and if it’s entertainment Brazilian players want, then our modular platform, software and data feed services has that in spades.

• We covered 100+ sports, offering more than 530,000 sportsbook events in Q3 2024 alone.
• We provide industry-leading, 1,000+ pre-match markets for English Premier League matches where the median across tier-one operators is just 293.
• Only 11 of our sports are available with BetBuilder, including pre-live and live on football, tennis, basketball and more.

Did you know? 

OddsMatrix offers more live football matches than any other operator or supplier in the world. Between October 2023 and September 2024, we provided 137,260 live matches across 2,923 competitions.

Look out for more detailed data analysis from EveryMatrix on our LinkedIn page and at www.oddsmatrix.com between now and ICE 2025, where our experts will be available to discuss all your sports betting needs.

Tor Skeie is CEO of OddsMatrix, EveryMatrix’s sportsbook division. He has played an influential role in the igaming industry for more than two decades, specialising in technological development and delivery. He was at the forefront of the betting exchange boom at the turn of the century and founded one the original versions of peer-to-peer platform betting. In 2013 he founded front-end solutions business TOTOIT, which acquired by EveryMatrix in October 2020. Since being appointed CEO in March 2023, Skeie has since guided OddsMatrix to record annual performance numbers in 2024.