The NFL sides with 40 states against the Trump administration’s stance on predictive markets. In a brief support for New Jersey’s appeal to the Supreme Court, the league urged the justices to decide who sets the rules for prediction markets: regulators in Washington or individual states, CBS News reports. The league says federal regulators’ “laisser-faire approach” “threatens the integrity of the game” and undermines its efforts to work with states to regulate sports betting, Politico reports. “The NFL’s top priority has been to preserve the integrity of its games and protect its fans as legal sports betting spreads from state to state,” the brief states.
The NFL said it agrees with previous court rulings that contracts tied to game outcomes are simply “sports betting,” not complex financial “exchanges,” and should fall under state gambling laws — ideally before the end of the current season, CBS reports. The league noted that on the first Sunday of the season, more than half of the $3.3 billion in trades were related to the NFL, the AP reports. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission now oversees the markets, but at least 10 states have challenged platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, saying they should be regulated by state gambling laws.
In a brief filed Wednesday, attorneys general from 39 states and Washington, D.C., said that “states have held traditional power over sports gambling since the founding of this country,” Politico reports. Prediction Markets “claims to have discovered this escape hatch, without enforcement of state law, buried in a subsection of a section of a federal financial reform bill passed in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis,” they write. “Prediction markets are wrong. They cannot deprive states of their primary sovereign power by relabeling and disguising them.”
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