Study on loans for the World Cup inflates Klavi's real data in a conclusion that it does not support.
A report published by CartaCapital this week, titled ' Loan Contracts Among Betting Enthusiasts Nearly Doubled During the World Cup ,' has given new impetus to a thesis that has become commonplace in coverage of the sports betting market: that the growth of betting is pushing part of the Brazilian population into a cycle of indebtedness. The text relies on a survey by the fintech company Klavi and presents a concrete fact—the frequency of loan contracts among bettors was 1,8 times higher than among non-bettors during the World Cup. The problem lies not in this number, but in what the report does with it.
According to the study, which uses Open Finance data from a sample of 1,2 million people, in three out of four cases the bet preceded the loan, with a median of seven days between the two events. Klavi itself, as cited in the report, is keen to put the finding into perspective: "knowing which event came first is not the same as proving that it caused the second," says the company, acknowledging that the result may be influenced by other debt factors unrelated to betting.
It's a methodologically correct caveat—and rarely cited explicitly in an article about the sector. The problem is that it only lasts one paragraph. Following that, the text states that "there is evidence, therefore, that the total amount sent to betting sites during the World Cup—at least R$ 992 million [...]—depended on the systematic indebtedness of Brazilians." This sentence is not a quote from Klavi. It's a conclusion drawn by the publication itself, based on a premise that the cited data does not support.
Relative frequency to the total cake
The study measures one specific thing: the proportion of gamblers who took out loans, compared to the proportion of non-gamblers who did the same. It's data about the behavior of a subpopulation. Nowhere in the published research is there an estimate of what portion of the R$992 million wagered during the World Cup originated from borrowed money. Treating the two as if they were the same measure—from "gamblers take out credit proportionally more" to "the total wagered in the country depended on credit"—is an inference that misses the mark: it generalizes to the aggregate an effect observed only in the relative frequency of a subgroup.
The same applies to the "1,8 times greater" headline of the study. This is a relative risk, lacking the base rate that would allow us to understand the true dimension of the phenomenon. If the frequency of loans jumped from 2% to 3,6% of the sample or from 20% to 36%, the multiplier is identical—but the social significance of the data changes entirely. None of the reports that replicated the study, as far as this text has ascertained, presented this absolute number.
Correlation with date, not necessarily causation.
The temporal precedence between betting and borrowing—the bet occurring, on average, seven days prior—is often interpreted as evidence of a mechanism: the person bets, loses, and resorts to credit to cover the shortfall. This is a plausible hypothesis, but not the only one compatible with the data. It is also compatible with a financial behavior profile that leads the same person to bet and take out credit for reasons independent of each other, or with a situation of financial hardship prior to both episodes—a variable that the study design does not capture or isolate. Klavi acknowledges this limitation; the coverage does not.
What is left out of the calculation?
There are still points that were overlooked in the report. The study sample comes from users who consented to share data via Open Finance — a group that is, by definition, more integrated into the formal financial system, which may distort the interpretation of a population of gamblers that includes a significant portion resorting to informal credit, outside of any banking tracking. The report also does not clarify what Klavi is calling a "loan" — whether the category includes overdraft, credit card revolving debt, payroll loans, or just personal loans, modalities with quite distinct debt logics.
It is also worth noting that Klavi itself sells a product called "Betting Risk Indicator" to financial institutions, a score built on this same type of transactional data. This is not to dismiss the survey for that reason—but to acknowledge that the company has a direct commercial interest in consolidating the narrative that betting generates measurable and marketable credit risk, information that is not included in the report that cites it as a source.
Finally, the context of scale deserves mention: the R$992 million recorded by Klavi for the entire World Cup period fell well below the R$20 billion in deposits projected by the consulting firm H2 Gambling Capital for the Brazilian market before the tournament. The consulting firm's own CEO acknowledged, after the World Cup, that the volume fell short of expectations. It is difficult to sustain the framework of "systematic indebtedness on a national scale" for a phenomenon whose own benchmark value has already surprised those who monitor the sector with a critical bias.
What do the data really allow us to say?
None of this invalidates the study's central finding: gamblers in this sample took out loans relatively more frequently than non-gambling gamblers during the World Cup, and most did not see a positive financial return from their bets—46,8% of the sample saw no money return to their bank account. These are data that deserve to be recorded and monitored. What the numbers don't allow—and what the report asserts anyway—is that total gambling consumption in the country "depended" on systematic indebtedness. This is an editorial thesis disguised as a study conclusion, and it's the kind of slip-up that, repeated in report after report, builds a public consensus that the original data themselves don't support. Therefore, the report earns the 'BNLData Narrative Seal'.
