Kalshi, one of the two largest prediction markets in the U.S., is pushing it’s platform as a way to bet on the NFL without calling it gambling — but it is.
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A phone displays sports trades on Polymarket, one of the two largest prediction markets in the U.S.
Jenny Kane/Associated Press
Like millions of football fans, I’ve been looking forward to the start of the NFL and NCAA seasons. I’m all in for my teams, and I can’t resist watching compelling games with great players and intriguing storylines.
But I do so with a growing concern that a game so many love for the skill, competition and fan loyalty it engenders could be tarnished by an insidious government-sanctioned euphemism — prediction markets.
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Prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which have been advertising heavily in advance of the football season, provide online platforms for so-called event trading. People pay money for an event contract and are paid an agreed amount if the outcome they predict happens. They get nothing if it doesn’t happen.
Calling this other than gambling is an act of supreme gaslighting and sanitization. It is an attempt to swaddle it in the warm blanket of commodity futures trading.
In the last few years, we’ve been fed — in dystopian-like rationale — the notion that if we recast this type of “trading” as buying a future’s contract, it’s somehow not a bet and, therefore, not gambling.
ALSO READ: Prediction markets bring dangerous brand of gambling to football
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The potential for abuse and harm go well beyond the gambling institutions we cope with.
As the most popular spectator sport in the U.S., football is heavily bet on at the professional and collegiate levels. After the U.S. Supreme Court, in Murphy v. NCAA, overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, the NCAA and major sports leagues were no longer insulated from dealing with widespread gambling on their games.
States became free to legalize sports betting, and it wasn’t long before online sportsbook operators such as DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM and Caesars Entertainment expanded. By 2025, people in the U.S. were legally betting roughly $167 billion annually on sports, according to the American Gaming Association.
But not all states got on board, and those that did maintained the authority — and responsibility — to regulate the activity to ensure integrity and safeguard the public, as well as to appropriately tax such operators, generating $3.7 billion in state taxes last year.
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Meanwhile, in 2021, the NFL announced its first partnerships with U.S. sportsbook operators, starting with Caesars, DraftKings and FanDuel. The move was an acknowledgement that such activity was inevitable and that by being involved, the league could have a voice in setting parameters for preserving the integrity of its product.
While gambling on the NFL has grown, it has reached a manageable and lucrative equilibrium, as the American Gaming Association projects legal betting on the NFL to remain essentially flat from last year at about $29.5 billion.
Enter prediction markets, which are expected to surpass sportsbook betting. RotoWire, a sports data website often consulted by fantasy sports players and gamblers, projects that prediction market trading volume on NFL-related outcomes this season will more than double to roughly $36.8 billion.
Yet prediction markets, unlike online sportsbooks, are not subject to state regulation because the federal government has actively contributed to the fantasy that they’re not gambling.
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The U.S. Commodity and Futures Trading Commission — often criticized as weak, inconsistent, too close to industry, and lacking the tools and know-how to deal with the technology driving modern trading — has claimed sole regulatory authority over prediction markets.
“The CFTC is taking an important step to ensure that these markets have a place here in America,” CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said. “To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, we will see you in court.”
Since then, the CFTC has sued multiple states that have taken measures to regulate or ban prediction markets. While the CFTC’s insistence on coddling prediction markets might seem odd to casual observers, it’s notable that Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to Kalshi and Polymarket, the two largest prediction-market platforms as measured by trading volume and public prominence, while his firm 1789 Capital is reported to have invested roughly $500 million in Polymarket.
It’s no wonder the NFL and NCAA are concerned about the adequacy of the CFTC’s regulatory approach to prediction markets with respect to their games.
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The NFL said the CFTC’s recently published draft rules “fall significantly short of protecting the integrity of sporting events,” as well as people who participate in prediction markets. The league found it “surprising” that the CFTC did not adopt more of the “common-sense integrity and consumer protection measures” that the NFL suggested in a May 15 letter the league sent to Selig before the CTFC published proposed rules in the Federal Register in June.
Similarly, in January, NCAA President Charlie Baker wrote to Selig that the “growth and haphazard nature of collegiate sport prediction markets pose a significant threat” to the “well-being of student-athletes and the integrity of competition.”
“I implore you to suspend collegiate sport prediction markets,” Baker wrote, “until a more robust system with appropriate safeguards is in place.”
Indeed, the NCAA and Texas Tech University are barely getting over the gambling controversy involving quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who passed on entering the NFL draft to transfer to the Red Raiders from the University of Cincinnati. Following revelations that Sorsby had made thousands of sports bets as a college athlete at two prior universities, the NCAA declared him ineligible.
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And after a judge in Lubbock County issued a temporary injunction reinstating Sorsby, the Big 12 Conference, of which Texas Tech is a member, reportedly began considering options for sanctioning the school. The crisis was averted when Sorsby announced that he would cease his efforts to play for Texas Tech, but the matter left a mark.
And while Sorsby — who posted on social media that he had “completed a residential treatment program for a diagnosed gambling addiction” — reportedly used FanDuel, the potential for prediction markets to exacerbate problems like his is sobering.
More Perfect Union, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, concluded after consulting experts on gambling and public health: “We are in the middle of a gambling public health crisis” that is “hitting young men particularly badly. We’ve taken a very addictive behavior, and we’ve put it in the hands of everyone, everywhere, all the time.”
Meanwhile, the line between sportsbooks and prediction markets is getting blurred — if not in real terms, at least in perception.
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Online sportsbook operators are getting into prediction markets, enabling them to operate in states where their sportsbooks are banned. And they’re integrating prediction markets on their apps, such that they’re indistinguishable.
In March, DraftKings announced plans to launch DraftKings Sports & Casino, which it called a “super app” that would bring sportsbook, predictions, casino and lottery operations “into one seamless, integrated experience through a single account and wallet.” In June, it launched DKeX, a proprietary prediction markets exchange that it folded into that super app, enabling it “to deliver differentiated sports experiences across the country alongside its leading sportsbook.”
Why shouldn’t it be integrated into one app? It’s all gambling.
Prediction markets do differ in two notable respects: who wins and how much losers lose.
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In December, a blockchain analyst called DeFi Oasis posted on social media that after analyzing roughly 1.7 million Polymarket trading addresses, it found that roughly 70% recorded realized losses and that fewer than 0.04% of addresses captured more than 70% of total realized profits.
Professional and college football, while beloved, have plenty of issues to deal with, such as concussions for players and affordability for fans.
We should take prediction markets off the list.
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tony.quesada@express-news.net