This summer has seen the very nature of what constitutes a prediction, contract or sports wager called into question.
Against this backdrop, it may not surprise you to learn there is a whole new category of sports betting product in Latin America.
Native to Argentina, El Prode is more akin to an office or family sweepstake than a full-on sports betting bonanza.
But this year's World Cup saw a formal re-emergence of the game via mainstream Argentinian payments companies. A number of standalone apps and websites also exist, easily accessible via a quick Google search.
Perhaps most intriguingly, however, this is not actually a new product. The Prode has a rich history in Argentina, even being discontinued by the state lottery in 2018.
This raises several questions about its summer rebirth...
What caused the original Prode's rise and fall?
Argentina's Concurso de Pronósticos Deportivos, better known as the Prode/El Prode, was the country’s version of a format that already existed elsewhere; welfare minister Francisco Manrique adapted it from Italy's Totocalcio and Brazil's Loteria Esportiva, both of which were drawing hundreds of thousands of weekly bettors when he pushed the game through by decree in November 1971.
The first round, played the final weekend of February 1972, drew 152,202 bets from 32,000 players. Estudiantes de La Plata beat CA Atlanta 2-0 and the Prode ran weekly for a quarter century before ceasing in early 1998. It was relaunched in 2000, although never quite to its original scale.
The Prode's institutional home, state-owned Lotería Nacional, wound down gradually after 2017, when Loto, Quiniela and other games were transferred to the Lotería de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. The final blow came in February 2018, when a Macri Government decree placed Lotería Nacional into liquidation, ending the Prode.
The Government's stated justification was financial, arguing the company could no longer cover the cost of its own structure. For a generation of Argentinians, the disappearance of the printed Prode card, once filled out in offices and among friends every week, marked the end of a shared national ritual.
And yet the underlying underlying appetite for predicting results never went away.
The 2026 World Cup has met this appetite. Its rebirth, though, has been powered entirely by private financial technology companies rather – not the state.
How a World Cup revival was built by payments companies
Ahead of the tournament, three of Argentina's largest fintech platforms launched their own prediction contests, each tied to a distinct business objective rather than to sport for its own sake. Mercado Pago, the payments arm of Marcos Galperin's Mercado Libre, introduced Fixture 2026, a free contest requiring users to predict match results in exchange for a top prize of $50,000, with $20,000 and $10,000 for second and third place. There were additional daily draws of ARS$10,000 ($7) in cash and thousands of Mercado Libre purchase orders.
Football draws users to the app more often than any single financial product would on its own
The company reported more than 9.5 million registered users over the age of 18, a figure it said exceeded internal expectations. It framed the game explicitly as a driver of engagement across an already dominant user base, rather than a tool for new customer acquisition.
Cocos, an investment platform, took a different approach, requiring participants to subscribe at a price of at least ARS$1,000 to compete for a prize pool of roughly ARS$100m in fund shares. The World Cup was used to accelerate onboarding into capital markets products and encourage financial literacy among a younger audience.
Lemon built a crypto-denominated version, distributing up to $4,000 in USDC and USDT stablecoins. This was based on prediction accuracy, rewarding account activity such as QR payments and card usage in the event of a tie; a structure aimed squarely at deepening loyalty among its existing crypto-native community.
Ualá also joined with a smaller sweepstakes tied to national team predictions. Executives across the sector described the underlying logic in similar terms: football draws users to the app more often than any single financial product would on its own, even if conversion or cross-sell remains an age-old problem that follows.
What did regulators say about the new Prode?
The scale of these new Prodes – more than 2.3 million users logged over 60 million match predictions on Mercado Pago's platform within the tournament's opening weeks – drew the attention of Argentina's state gambling regulators.
The Asociación de Loterías, Quinielas y Casinos Estatales, which groups the provincial and national bodies that license and control gambling activity, sent Mercado Pago a formal notice in June. It warned that its "Torneo de amigos" feature, which had allowed users to organize private pools involving real money, could meet the legal definition of unauthorized bet collection under article 301 bis of the Penal Code. This provision carries prison terms of three to six years for operating unlicensed gambling...
The warning arrived amid a broader tightening of enforcement; the gambling prosecutor's office in the city had ordered the blocking of Polymarket in March following a complaint from the Lotería de la Ciudad. Congress was separately debating bills addressing illegal betting and problem gambling.
Mercado Pago rejected ALEA's characterization, maintaining that Fixture 2026 collected no money from users and that prizes were funded entirely by the company. But it nonetheless altered the disputed friends tournament function, replacing real-money staking with a symbolic points system capped at ARS$70,000 per person. Winners would split a pool of accumulated points rather than cash contributed by other players.
ALEA confirmed the dispute was resolved once the change took effect and the contest continued through the remainder of the tournament.
Are payments companies teaching an old dog new tricks?
What happened at the 2026 FIFA World Cup points to a broader shift in consumer behavior that extends well beyond a single regulatory dispute. The Prode format that state lottery agencies withdrew from the market in 2018 returned in 2026 not through a public tender or a new state operator, but through private financial platforms already embedded in the daily financial lives of millions of Argentinians. Rather than creating a new betting product, fintech companies repackaged a familiar format inside apps that users already opened every day.
Private companies proved the same format could become commercially valuable when treated as a customer engagement tool rather than a standalone gambling product
It is very much the spirit of modern innovation. Repackage something in a way that meets public demand. Sound familiar? (Prediction markets, anyone!)
Mercado Pago's ability to attract 9.5 million participants within weeks, modify its friends tournament under regulatory scrutiny and continue operating throughout the tournament showed that distribution, rather than the game itself, had become the competitive advantage. The Prode did not return because someone reinvented it; it returned because someone placed it inside an ecosystem people already used.
That also exposed a gap in Argentina's regulated lottery market. When the Prode disappeared, demand for prediction games did not disappear with it, yet no comparable digital alternative emerged from the lottery system. By the time regulators intervened, millions of users had already embraced fintech-led versions, leaving the regulated sector reacting to innovation instead of setting the pace.
Argentinians dubbed the tournament "The World Cup of Betting," a label that reflected far more than the record volumes reported by licensed sportsbooks. The biggest betting story of the tournament was that one of Argentina's best-known gambling formats had returned without a lottery operator behind it. The state closed the Prode because operating it through Lotería Nacional no longer made financial sense. Eight years later, private companies proved the same format could become commercially valuable when treated as a customer engagement tool rather than a standalone gambling product.
The 2018 liquidation killed an operator, not a market. The companies that ultimately brought the Prode back were not lottery operators at all, but fintech platforms that understood the real value proposition.
It wasn't all about the game itself... it was about making it part of everyday life for Argentinians.
Betting searches surged 6,200% in Argentina during the World Cup final
