“No country banned it and it worked”: the remarks by Udo Seckelmann and José Francisco Manssur that irritated MP defenders at Brazil’s Supreme Court

At a public hearing at Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court on Provisional Measure No. 1.394/2026, two club presentations directly challenged the government’s case for banning fixed-odds betting. The sharpest pushback came from Udo Seckelmann, speaking for SAF Botafogo, and José Francisco Manssur, speaking for Cruzeiro, both of whom argued that the international and local record does not support prohibition as a tool against addiction, debt, or the illegal market.

1. Seckelmann targeted the three stated goals of the MP: reducing ludopatia (gambling addiction), household debt, and the illegal market. He accepted those goals as legitimate, but said neither the MP’s explanatory memorandum nor the Attorney General’s arguments produced “a single example of a country” that banned online betting and achieved those results.His line was blunt: “And do you know why none was brought, Your Honor? Because international experience shows the opposite.”
2. The exchange landed awkwardly for the pro-ban side because the government representatives had already left the courtroom. Attorney General of the Union, Justice Minister Wellington César Lima e Silva, and first lady Janja da Silva departed right after their interventions, before hearing the remaining guests. On the audience side, businesswoman Paula Lavigne and a representative of Instituto Alana, both aligned with the civil-society front supporting the ban, also left before the hearing ended.
3. Seckelmann argued that more than 90% of the 38 OECD countries and more than 75% of G20 countries regulate online betting. He said the G20 figure is held back only by Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, where the activity remains illegal for religious reasons.For PSPs, the practical point is simple: the argument here is not that regulation is perfect, but that prohibition is the outlier. That matters when lawmakers try to frame the Brazilian market as a solvable enforcement problem rather than a policy choice.
4. He then pointed to China, which had already been used in public debate as a model for Brazil. Seckelmann cited a July 2026 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which estimates that Greater China — including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan — accounts for about half of global illegal betting volume, calculated at between US$ 340 billion and US$ 1.7 trillion per year, despite prohibition in force since 1949.According to Seckelmann, the report concludes on page 133 that prohibition shifted demand abroad rather than eliminating it. His point was straightforward: if China, with its extensive state apparatus, cannot contain the illegal market, Brazil should not assume it can do better by simply banning the legal one.
5. He also challenged the government’s own numbers. Before the MP was issued, there were 188 authorized sites under the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA/MF). During roughly 20 months of regulation, more than 66,000 illegal sites were blocked, according to the material cited in the hearing.That is the part payment teams and operators will care about: the dispute is no longer about whether the market exists, but about whether the state wants to regulate it, suppress it, or keep chasing it across domains and mirrors.