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Prediction Markets Reshaping Sports Betting Landscape With NFL Season Upon Us

By jili tutorial · September 5, 2026

Prediction Markets Reshaping Sports Betting Landscape With NFL Season Upon Us

As the NFL season kicks off, a new era in sports wagering is unfolding. Prediction markets are increasingly competing on the turf of industry giants like FanDuel and DraftKings. While traditional sportsbooks are adjusting, they may be too late to catch up with exchange-based platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket in attracting customers.

A Shift in the Betting Ecosystem

Just a year ago, Kalshi and Crypto.com—through a partnership with Underdog—were the only federally regulated, U.S.-based prediction markets offering NFL bets. Now, nearly a dozen such platforms are flooding the market with bets, swaps, parlays, and combos. Their goal: to deepen their foothold among American gamblers, often at the expense of state-regulated sportsbooks. Despite claims that they offer something different from gambling, prediction markets are positioning themselves as direct competitors.

Even as these disruptors face legal pushback, their influence on the future of sports betting is undeniable. BetMGM, which unlike rivals DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics has no prediction market app, recently added features to its platform ahead of Week 1 specifically designed to appeal to exchange users.

“It definitely feels like a pretty pivotal NFL season,” said Jeff Laniado, director of sales at marketing platform Optimove, in an interview with Gambling Insider.

Why NFL Bettors Are Moving to Prediction Markets

According to an Optimove study, 60% of NFL bettors plan to “trade, buy, or sell event contracts on prediction markets this year.” Last September, prediction markets—almost entirely dominated by Kalshi—generated $5 billion in volume, mostly from sports. By April, that figure had surged to $24 billion, even before the FIFA World Cup bonanza.

“That’s obviously not even an NFL month. The scale, even versus last year, it’s going to be way, way bigger,” Laniado noted. “You have Kalshi and Polymarket, who are going to be marketing heavily and going on a big acquisition spree. It’ll be Polymarket’s first NFL season with their U.S. product, so I’m curious to see what they do. But then you have the incumbents—DraftKings, FanDuel, Fanatics—who are also launching big campaigns.”

Reaching New Audiences: Younger Bettors and Unregulated States

Prediction markets are also targeting states that haven’t legalized sports betting, such as California, Georgia, and Texas. DraftKings recently launched state-specific ads in these regions, offering new customers $200 after a $5 first trade. The fine print notes that “Event Contract Trading is offered by DraftKings Predictions, a CFTC-registered” entity.

Additionally, prediction markets can attract customers younger than the minimum sports betting age in most states. CNN reported that $5.4 billion has been wagered on Kalshi this year by users aged 18 to 21, despite most states requiring bettors to be at least 21 for licensed sportsbooks.

“Marketing-wise and advertising-wise, this could feel like the 2018-19 blur of non-stop commercials and lucrative promotions that have since faded,” Laniado said, comparing it to the early days of legal sports betting after the PASPA repeal. “It was evolving from DFS into real-money sports betting, and every hot dog cart in New York City had a FanDuel or DraftKings ad. I feel like that’s what it’s going to feel like in a month from now.”

Parlays and Combos: The New Normal

Prediction market users have quickly developed a taste for parlays—called “combos” on these platforms—mirroring the preferences of traditional sports bettors.

“Ten years ago, when I was betting on sports, parlays were this niche thing nobody even knew about. You only knew that word if you were a degenerate sports fan,” Laniado recalled. “Now it’s become so mainstream.”

According to the Cap Space newsletter, 41% of Kalshi’s $6 billion volume through August 12 consisted of parlays. The Eilers & Krejcik Gaming newsletter reported that Kalshi controls 94% of the parlay market among prediction platforms. DraftKings’ DKex handled $11 million in business during its first four days of offering parlays in August, accounting for about 36% of its contract volume.

“Combos are the fastest-growing category in prediction markets,” noted analyst Sam Schwartz, highlighting Kalshi’s 28.3% growth in combos over the past week.

BetMGM: Prediction Markets Are Reshaping the Sportsbook

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which regulates prediction markets, set an August 31 deadline for removing numerical odds in favor of traditional percentages. The goal was to avoid the argument that these exchanges are just thinly veiled sports betting. All major U.S. players complied.

Meanwhile, BetMGM has updated its app to resemble the prediction market experience—part of a broader refresh for the NFL season. The app now lets users view wagers as implied probability or odds and includes a value-tracking feature.

“We’ve been talking to our players a lot over the past year, just around prediction markets,” said BetMGM’s product management leader, Brittany Dunbar, during a product demonstration. “For those dabbling in prediction markets, what do they like? What don’t they like? One consistent thing we heard is that for a sub-segment of players, they prefer the implied probability presentation over American odds.”

Dunbar noted that routine reviews of competitor apps have expanded to include prediction markets. “What’s happened over the past 18 months is the competitive set has broadened. There are all these prediction market products now. It’s interesting how they came about it—much more from a financial asset perspective, with tools and functionality akin to Robinhood or a classic banking product. It is shaping how we think about what a best-in-class sportsbook experience looks like.”

Laniado called the “exponential” innovation in prediction market apps over the past year “pretty mind-blowing,” especially given the size of the companies involved. Kalshi, for example, has around 200 employees, while full-scale gambling companies often have up to 5,000.

“There’s this competitive pressure driving both sides to improve the product,” Laniado said. “The first moment that made me think, ‘Oh, this is really going to take off’ was when prediction markets started expressing games in traditional odds like -150. And the parlay products are growing every week. They’re getting closer to offering everything that state-licensed sportsbooks do.”

DraftKings CEO Jason Robins echoed this sentiment during a second-quarter earnings call, stating, “The similarity of Predictions customer metrics to Sportsbook customer metrics, our advantaged LTV position, and our playbook to innovate on a leading Predictions offering all underpin our confidence that we can win the category this NFL season and beyond.” DraftKings split DKex off as a new prediction market from DraftKings Predictions in June.

Sportsbooks: From Interlopers to Defenders

Sportsbooks, once the disruptors in the gambling world, are now defending their turf. PENN Entertainment CEO Jay Snowden predicted a fierce promotional battle this fall.

“You’re going to have prediction markets targeting customers for the first football season ever, given the timeline of when they actually went live close to the Super Bowl last year,” Snowden said during a second-quarter earnings call. “So we already assumed it would be a very aggressive, irrational marketing spend this football season.”

However, Laniado believes that this time, DraftKings and FanDuel won’t rush in to dominate the new digital gambling realm the way they did after the PASPA repeal.