Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, the NFL is shocked to discover that people are irresponsibly gambling on football games.
Despite receiving $200 million a year in revenue from gambling partners like DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics Sportsbook — in addition to the $120 million those same sports apps then spend on advertising during football games — the NFL filed a brief last week asking the Supreme Court to ban the prediction market Kalshi from offering contracts on NFL games.
States across the country collected $3.7 billion in taxes from state-approved gambling apps in 2025 and zero revenue directly from the prediction market Kalshi. Governments guard their revenue streams jealously, so as Kalshi’s trading volume has grown, states have wanted to wet their beaks with its profits. Hence New Jersey’s cease-and-desist letter to Kalshi demanding that it remove sports-related contracts from its app, and Kalshi’s response seeking a judgment that New Jersey has no legal authority to make such a demand.
Traditional gambling apps take bets against a sportsbook that sets the odds and pays the winners. Prediction markets such as Kalshi instead match buyers and sellers of contracts that pay out if a specified event occurs, with prices moving as users trade. Both let customers risk money on football, but state governments regulate sportsbooks, while Kalshi argues that its contracts fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
In its brief to the Supreme Court, the NFL argued the world would end if the CFTC, and not states, were allowed to continue regulating prediction markets. “[T]he regulatory oversight of sports wagering on [prediction markets], pose a significant challenge to the NFL’s game-integrity and consumer-protection efforts,” the NFL wrote. “Any delay from the Court will result in increasing consumer harm and risk to game integrity.”
Consumer harm, you say? Has the NFL been paying any attention at all to the very real harm its existing partnerships with state-regulated gambling apps are causing?
A study published in Management Science this year used credit reports covering roughly 7 million consumers to examine what happened as states legalized sports betting. Researchers found that introducing online betting in states that already allowed in-person wagers reduced average credit scores by about 12 points. The decline accompanied increases in bankruptcy filings, debt sent to collections, credit card delinquencies, and auto loan delinquencies. Apparently, the state regulation the NFL celebrates has not prevented gambling apps from damaging consumers’ finances.
A second study, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, examined household transactions and found that online sports betting reduced savings and crowded out investments. The damage was concentrated among financially constrained households, whose credit card debt and overdrafts increased while available credit declined. Betting did not simply replace other gambling or ordinary spending. It ate into households’ efforts to build financial security. But the NFL does not seem to care as long as those DraftKings endorsement checks keep clearing.
ON PREDICTION MARKETS, LET’S TAKE IT TO COURT
The NFL does make some solid points about the gambling apps agreeing to ban certain types of bets that are problematic, including wagers on outcomes that are susceptible to manipulation by one person (like missing a particular field goal) or are known before the game starts (like whether the first play is going to be a run or a pass). But these objections read more like comments any stakeholder would make in a regular agency rulemaking process; they are not claims about whether or not Congress created an exception to the Commodity Exchange Act that would remove sports-related contracts from the CFTC’s jurisdiction.
Ideally, Congress would ban both sports-related prediction markets and gambling apps, but until that happens, the Supreme Court should not be in the business of protecting sports league gambling revenues under the guise of consumer protection.