Already established in Brazil as a great supporter of sports, with emphasis on
sponsoring the Brasileirão Series A, galera.bet will 3️⃣ start accepting, from January
2024, bets on rodeos.
With the football market already flooded with around a thousand
betting sites vying 3️⃣ for the attention of fans willing to place their bets, one of the
main players in this segment in Brazil 3️⃣ understood that the time has come to diversify
the business and be present in other arenas.
"There are already people doing 3️⃣ this, but
irregularly and in smaller rodeos. The sites are so small that the odds are manually
adjusted as bets 3️⃣ arrive," says the CEO of galera.bet, Marcos Sabiá.
Sabiá, however,
recognizes that the undertaking involves a certain risk, precisely because almost 3️⃣ no
one does it and also because there is little information that allows the size of the
potential audience to 3️⃣ be estimated. Even in countries where there is already a more
mature rodeo betting market — such as the United 3️⃣ States and Canada — there is little
open data from those who operate, which also makes any type of projection 3️⃣ for Brazil
difficult.
What encourages galera.bet to make this bet is the country culture that is
rooted in Brazil, not only 3️⃣ due to the rodeos and ‘vaquejadas’ that are popular in the
interior, but also due to the success of the 3️⃣ songs and the money that agribusiness
generates. "There are around 70 million people who live the agricultural lifestyle and
country 3️⃣ culture. Not by chance, there is always country music in the top 5 most
listened to on Spotify," he highlights.
galera.bet, 3️⃣ which currently has 3 million users
on its platform, will be the first Playtech brand to enter this segment. In 3️⃣ Brazil,
there are around 100 rodeos that are organized by the PBR, the main international
league in the category. As 3️⃣ part of the plan to join this market, galera.bet decided to
be a master sponsor of the Circuito Sertanejo, which 3️⃣ includes the Barretos party, the
largest in the country, bringing together 1 million people per year. This is a similar
3️⃣ strategy to that adopted in football, as the brand sponsors Series A.
By entering
rodeos, the company's idea is not only 3️⃣ to diversify the operation, but also to
reinforce its positioning as an entertainment and fun business, and not just betting.
3️⃣ Furthermore, it wants the rodeo audience to have galera.bet as their preferred platform
for betting on any sport, differentiating itself 3️⃣ from the many others that mark the
fierce competition in football. "The guy who goes to the rodeo also has 3️⃣ a favorite team
and will also bet on the games."
The flood of bets that appear in football, in fact,
has 3️⃣ already caused problems for galera.bet that go beyond the fight for attendance. The
platform is fighting a legal battle with 3️⃣ the CBF to enforce its exclusive sponsorship
contract in Series A, because the confederation even included other brands in
advertising 3️⃣ pieces that should only have galera.bet.
The platforms have invested so
much in advertising that only one of the 40 teams 3️⃣ that are part of the first and second
division, Cuiabá, does not have a website as a sponsor on the 3️⃣ uniform. The advance,
driven by a law at the end of 2024 that opened the doors to this market, led 3️⃣ the
Chamber to approve another law this year to create regulation, which will still pass
through the Senate.
One of the 3️⃣ most relevant measures is the imposition of a fee of
R$30 million on sites to be able to operate, which 3️⃣ should remove smaller platforms from
the market, which do not have the cash to do so, leaving only the largest 3️⃣ in the race,
such as galera.bet, which will continue to have football as its most important market.
The entry barrier, 3️⃣ in fact, could help the company led by Sabiá have an easier path to
consolidating itself in the rodeo market.
Before 3️⃣ that, however, the company is facing
the challenge of building a long database of past rodeos that will allow it 3️⃣ to create
algorithms that calculate prizes with the highest possible level of accuracy in
relation to the odds, and updated 3️⃣ automatically. If this is already well understood in
football, in rodeos there is still a legacy of statistics to be 3️⃣ built. The work began
months ago and involves game science experts from Insper and UFPE.
The most sensitive
part, however, will 3️⃣ be creating mechanisms that prevent manipulation, an issue that
gained strength with the Parliamentary Commission of Investigation (CPI) that
investigates 3️⃣ cases involving football players. Just as on grass there are bets that
involve facts that can be easily manipulated by 3️⃣ a single person — such as a yellow card
—, in rodeos there are situations as simple as deciding whether 3️⃣ the rider will fall
prematurely or not.
To prevent problems like these, galera.bet intends to use
techniques that are already used 3️⃣ in football, such as knowing in depth the athletes'
history, to understand when there is something that is out of 3️⃣ the ordinary for that
professional and could represent evidence of manipulation, and monitor unusual
movements of money on the platform. 3️⃣ "It is in our interest to prevent these things from
happening, because if there is manipulation, it is the platform 3️⃣ that loses
money."
Source: Pipeline / Valor
