The National Football League wants state regulators, not the federal government, to oversee and regulate prediction markets such as Kalshi, the league wrote in a Supreme Court filing Thursday.
The league, noting that “billions of dollars will be bet on NFL games through prediction markets each season,” asked the court to swiftly take up a federal case between Kalshi and New Jersey officials. Last month, New Jersey asked the same of the court.
The case could determine the fate of sports-related prediction markets, which have enjoyed what the NFL called a “laissez-faire approach” to safeguards and rules from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in contrast to state gaming commissions’ often-rigid regulations.
The brief puts the NFL in opposition to the Trump administration, which this year has been suing states attempting to regulate prediction markets. The Trump family also has ties to Kalshi and its largest competitor, Polymarket, since Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both.
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However, the NFL told The Washington Sun that it does not see the filing as an all-out attack on the burgeoning prediction market industry.
“This is not about the NFL opposing prediction markets,” NFL spokesperson Tim Schlittner said. “This is about protecting game integrity and consumers — just like legalized sports betting.”
Elisabeth Diana, chief of communications at Kalshi, told The Sun that the integrity of its markets is the company’s “top priority.” She said this is reflected in Kalshi’s partnerships with other sports behemoths, including Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
Diana did not respond when asked whether prediction markets could operate under the legal structure the NFL is pushing for.
In its Supreme Court brief, the NFL disagreed with an earlier decision from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Kalshi successfully argued that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was the “exclusive regulator” over financial contracts known as “swaps” — in this case, the event contracts traded between users.
The 6th and 9th circuit courts of appeal highlighted that the definition of “swap” has limits: specifically that it “must be inherently associated with a potential financial or economic consequence, not just that the event or contingency have some potential downstream financial consequence,” the brief states.
While Kalshi points to the Dodd-Frank Act giving the CFTC “exclusive jurisdiction” over swaps, the NFL wrote in the brief that it was “inconceivable” Congress’ response to the 2008 financial crisis enabled the “nationwide legalization of sports bets.”
“Any delay from the Court will result in increasing consumer harm and risk to game integrity,” the NFL wrote in the brief. The NFL made up half of prediction markets’ volume on the first Sunday of its season, the league wrote.
The NFL has repeatedly objected to certain sports-related contracts on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. In March, NFL chief compliance officer Sabrina Perel wrote a letter to prediction market operators asking that they scrap “objectionable bets,” CNBC reported.
Some were “inherently objectionable,” such as markets allowing contracts on whether an athlete would sustain an injury while others were too easy to manipulate, such as whether a football placekicker would miss a field goal, Perel wrote.
“It is deeply concerning that bets within the objectionable categories that we identified months ago have been and continue to be listed as contracts on exchanges,” Perel wrote in a follow-up last month.
Diana rebuffed the NFL’s framing, writing that the “CFTC is actively policing sports-related markets, which are now listed on every US commodities exchange.”
“The CFTC’s ongoing rulemaking addresses many of the NFL’s supposed concerns,” she wrote. “And those rules sit atop the same comprehensive system of federal enforcement that protects trillions of dollars of transactions in US markets.”
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