Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies has approved a proposal from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government to establish a new public university dedicated exclusively to sport and partially funded by tax revenues generated from the country’s regulated fixed-odds online betting market.
The Universidade Federal do Esporte (UFEsporte), to be sited in the capital, Brasília, must still be approved by the Senate. It is designed to train professionals, stimulate research, strengthen elite performance and promote inclusion across Brazil’s sports system.
UFEsporte will be linked to the Ministry of Sport, but will not operate as a faculty within an existing university.
Instead, it will be created as an autonomous institution focused solely on the national sports ecosystem.
Scientific Research
The most distinctive feature of the proposal is its funding structure.
A portion of the university’s budget will be drawn from fiscal revenues generated by regulated sports betting, including taxes on operators’ gross gaming revenue, licensing fees and other charges.
In effect, part of the regulated gambling economy would be channelled directly into investment in sport and technical education.
The university’s remit would include training sports administrators, developing specialists in public sports policy, supporting applied scientific research and fostering technological innovation in areas such as training methodologies and sports governance.
Paralympic Sport
It would also cover sports medicine and physical performance studies, provide technical and academic support to elite athletes, and promote women’s sport, Paralympic sport and policies aimed at tackling discrimination and violence within sporting environments.
The government has framed the initiative as a long-standing demand of Brazil’s sports sector and a step towards professionalising national sports policy.
But opposition lawmakers have criticised the project as electorally motivated and an unnecessary expense given competing priorities in the education system.
Strategically, the proposal marks a deeper institutionalisation of sport as a matter of state policy. It also represents a targeted use of revenues from regulated gambling, a mechanism that can help reinforce the social legitimacy of Brazil’s betting framework by demonstrating visible public reinvestment.
By directing gambling-derived tax revenues into the creation of a permanent higher-education institution, Brazil would be going further than many established models.
