The number in the room was BRL350 million
Around 40 people from the legal, marketing and communications departments of Corinthians, Palmeiras, São Paulo, Santos and Juventus sat down at the São Paulo Football Federation with executives from betting companies, and the figure everyone kept circling back to was BRL350 million a year. That is the combined annual value of the betting sponsorships held by Corinthians (Esportes da Sorte), Palmeiras (Sportingbet) and São Paulo (Superbet) alone. A bill moving through the city council could make a large chunk of the visibility those deals pay for illegal inside São Paulo’s city limits.
If you take one thing from this, take this: betting advertising bans have stopped being a national-parliament story. They are now being written by city councils, and a municipal licence to ban is a very different animal from a federal licence to operate. Brazil spent years building a regulated national market with national advertising rules. A single city can still carve a hole in it.
What Bill 560/2025 actually does
The proposal, Bill 560/2025, prohibits advertising by betting companies at events held in the city of São Paulo. The wording is deliberately wide: it covers events organised by public or private entities, for-profit or non-profit. In practice that means no signage, banners or display panels in stadiums, arenas, gymnasiums and other sports venues.
It also reaches outside the turnstiles. Betting ads on public transport are caught too, including bus side panels, exteriors and rear windows. Breach it and the penalty is a BRL50,000 (roughly $10,000) fine plus a prohibition on hosting events for up to two years. For a stadium operator, that second part is the one that bites.
One thing the bill does not currently do is explicitly ban betting brands from team shirts. Some councillors want that added. Whether it goes in is arguably the single most consequential detail in the whole text, because shirt-front branding is where the largest cheques in betting sponsorship football deals are written, and it travels: a jersey worn in São Paulo is also worn in Belo Horizonte, on national television and on YouTube highlights.
Why the clubs are worried about geography, not just money
Reinaldo Carneiro Bastos, president of the São Paulo Football Federation, framed the risk as a sporting one rather than a purely commercial one: “If the city’s clubs lose this revenue, it will create a disparity that extends to the pitch.”
That is the argument you should expect to hear everywhere local gambling ad restrictions are proposed. A municipal ban applies to a postcode, not a league. Clubs in other Brazilian states would keep selling the same inventory to the same operators while São Paulo’s clubs could not, which turns an advertising rule into a competitive imbalance inside a national competition.
It also produces genuinely odd incentives. Club officials have raised the possibility of moving matches outside the city to keep advertising agreements intact. Think about what that implies: a rule intended to reduce gambling exposure could end up relocating fixtures rather than removing logos, while the broadcast feed, the shirt and the operator’s social media reach the same audience anyway. That gap between intent and effect is the strongest card the clubs have to play, and they know it.
For now, the response is still being assembled. Educational campaigns, collective legal action and direct coordination with political leaders in the city are all on the table, and one of the proposals could reach a council vote within days.
Betting advertising bans are following a recognisable playbook
Nothing about São Paulo’s bill is unprecedented in substance. Over the past several years a handful of European markets have run through a fairly consistent sequence: first restrict when and where ads appear, then restrict sport sponsorship, then argue about shirts.
Italy went furthest and earliest, with the 2018 “Dignity Decree” imposing a near-total prohibition on gambling advertising and sponsorship from 2019. Spain’s 2020 royal decree pushed broadcast advertising into a narrow late-night window and stopped gambling brands appearing on shirts, though parts of that decree were later challenged in the courts. The Netherlands banned untargeted gambling advertising and set out a phased end to sports sponsorship. Belgium introduced a broad advertising ban with sponsorship restrictions arriving in stages. In Britain there is still no statutory ban, but there is a pre-watershed “whistle-to-whistle” restriction on ads around live sport, and Premier League clubs agreed among themselves to drop front-of-shirt gambling sponsors from the end of the 2025-26 season.
Here is the broad shape of it, simplified:
| Market | Advertising approach | Sport sponsorship |
|---|---|---|
| Italy | Near-total ban since 2019 | Prohibited |
| Spain | Broadcast ads confined to a late-night window; parts contested in court | Shirt branding prohibited |
| Netherlands | Untargeted advertising banned | Phased out |
| Belgium | Broad advertising ban with limited exceptions | Restricted, phased |
| United Kingdom | No statutory ban; whistle-to-whistle restriction around live sport | Front-of-shirt ended voluntarily by Premier League clubs from end of 2025-26 |
| Brazil | National advertising rules under the regulated market, plus local bills such as São Paulo’s Bill 560/2025 | Currently permitted nationally; municipal restrictions pending |
What makes the Brazilian case different is the layer it sits on. The European examples were national decisions applied uniformly. São Paulo’s is a city ordinance landing on top of a federal licensing regime that already sets advertising standards for licensed operators. That is a new kind of regulatory risk, and it is one that a national licence does not insure you against.
What this means in practice if you work in the sector
Strip out the politics and there are a few concrete consequences worth planning around.
- Sponsorship contracts need territorial clauses that actually work. If a deal is priced on stadium signage and matchday activation in a specific city, a municipal sponsorship ban is a delivery failure. Who absorbs that, and how value is recalculated mid-term, is now a negotiating point rather than boilerplate.
- Media plans get fragmented. A national campaign that is compliant federally can be non-compliant in one metro area. Transport advertising, outdoor and event activation are the first things to fall out; broadcast and digital, which are harder for a city to police, become relatively more valuable.
- Clubs will look for replacement money, and there may not be much. In several markets that removed gambling sponsors, the vacated inventory did not command the same prices. Expect smaller clubs to feel that hardest.
- Affiliates and content partners inherit the ambiguity. Rules written for “advertising at events” rarely define influencer posts, on-site content capture or fan-zone activations cleanly. Assume the strictest reading until someone tests it.
- Voluntary codes buy time. The English top flight’s self-imposed shirt withdrawal is the clearest example of an industry moving first to shape the outcome. The educational campaigns São Paulo’s clubs are discussing point in the same direction.
The underlying policy question is not going away, and it is a legitimate one. Football is watched by children, gambling advertising is unavoidable when it is on the shirt, and regulators across several continents have concluded that sport-adjacent exposure is the part of the marketing mix hardest to justify. Operators who argue only about revenue tend to lose that debate. The ones who make headway usually arrive with something measurable on age-gating, ad targeting and player protection tools such as deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion.
What to watch next
Three things. Whether the jersey provision gets written into Bill 560/2025, because that decides whether this is a signage rule or a sponsorship ban. Whether the vote goes through and survives a legal challenge from the clubs, which would establish how far a Brazilian city can regulate on top of federal gambling advertising regulation. And whether other municipalities copy the text, because ad bans spread by imitation far faster than they spread by reasoned policy review.
If you buy or sell betting media in any market with strong club football, the São Paulo meeting is worth reading as a rehearsal. Sooner or later a council somewhere near you runs the same bill.
Gambling carries a built-in house edge and should be treated as paid entertainment, never as income. If it stops feeling like entertainment, use the deposit limits, cool-off and self-exclusion tools your operator is required to provide, or contact a national support service.