Fanatics Markets has secured US rights to offer the official prediction markets of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the company revealed this week. The product launches as a co-branded digital hub with PredictStreet (the Abu Dhabi company FIFA named its official prediction-markets platform in early April), running on the Fanatics Markets app and website. The contracts are brokered by Fanatics, trade on an exchange operated by Crypto.com, and are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The mechanics matter because they resolve a question that had hung over FIFA's April announcement. PredictStreet is an Abu Dhabi firm. It was issued an exchange-betting license by Gibraltar's gambling regulator last month and launched a crypto-based site that is not available in the US, its own host country for the tournament. There was no realistic path for PredictStreet to secure a US license in time for a June 11 kickoff. The pass-through arrangement is the workaround: Fanatics holds the US-facing relationships (the broker role, the CFTC-regulated exchange via Crypto.com, the consumer app), and PredictStreet contributes the official FIFA rights. The result is that only Fanatics can use official FIFA marks and licensed content in its World Cup event contracts, advertising, and promotions.
What a prediction market actually is, and why it matters here
A prediction market (or event contract) is a binary financial instrument: you buy a "yes" or "no" position on an outcome, the contract settles at $1 if you are right and $0 if you are wrong, and the live price between $0 and $1 reflects the market's implied probability. It is functionally similar to a moneyline bet, but it is structured as a tradable contract on a federally regulated exchange rather than a wager booked against a sportsbook.
That structural distinction is the entire reason this matters in the US. Sports betting is regulated state by state, and roughly 45% to 50% of US adults still cannot legally bet from home (the range depends on how you count Florida, which has legalized but runs a single-operator model). Event contracts on a CFTC-regulated exchange operate under federal commodities law, which is why prediction-market products have become the workaround in states where online sports betting remains illegal or restricted: California, Texas, Georgia, and, for practical purposes, Florida. For the World Cup, that is an enormous addressable audience that no legal sportsbook can touch.
Who else is in the market, and what Fanatics has that they do not
Fanatics is not alone in offering World Cup prediction products. Kalshi, Polymarket, PrizePicks, DraftKings, and others will all have World Cup event contracts running through the same federal workaround. What Fanatics has that none of them do is the official FIFA license: the marks, the licensed content, and the ability to advertise as the official prediction-markets product of the tournament.
Whether that license is worth a great deal is the open question. Official-sponsor status carries real weight with casual fans who do not distinguish between platforms and gravitate to the one with the tournament logo on it. It carries much less weight with the experienced prediction-market user who is shopping for the tightest spread and the deepest liquidity, which is where Kalshi and Polymarket have a head start. The license is a casual-acquisition asset, not a sharp-liquidity asset. For a company whose entire strategy is built around the casual fan and the broader Fanatics ecosystem, that is a reasonable bet.
The $200 million to $300 million land grab
The World Cup is the first major event since the prediction apps from DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics began expanding their sports menus, positioning for a fight over customers in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and the other states their sportsbooks have been locked out of. DraftKings and FanDuel have each said they expect to spend $200 million to $300 million launching prediction markets, likely beginning during the World Cup and accelerating into football season.
Fanatics Betting and Gaming CEO Matt King described what is coming as "an advertising avalanche like we have not seen in a very long time," running from this summer through the fall. His framing of the Fanatics position is that the company is playing the long game rather than matching DraftKings and FanDuel dollar for dollar: in his words, "you're not going to see us trying to go toe-to-toe with people that are going to spend what we would think are uneconomic dollars on advertising." He expects the summer and fall to be "a bit of chaos."
That posture is consistent with how Fanatics has spent. The company ramped TV advertising last fall with a Livvy Dunne campaign and followed it with a Kendall Jenner Super Bowl spot, but its TV frequency still trails DraftKings and FanDuel by a wide margin. The Fanatics differentiator is not ad spend. It is FanCash, the loyalty program that lets bettors and shoppers earn reward money on every bet or purchase, redeemable across the broader Fanatics merchandise ecosystem. FanCash earned from betting can be spent on merchandise, and the reverse. King says the loyalty loop is "a huge reason why people are switching to using the sportsbook," and that bringing it to prediction markets is a real edge because, as he put it, "there are no loyalty programs in prediction markets."
Where Fanatics sits in the handle race
The loyalty strategy appears to be working. In the 15 states that report handle by individual sportsbook, Fanatics moved ahead of BetMGM and into third place at the start of last football season. BetMGM retook the spot in January, but by March Fanatics held a 10% share to BetMGM's 8%. The most recent first-quarter regulator reports show the broader pecking order holding, with some gaps widening:
- DraftKings leads at 35%, opening a 3-point gap
- FanDuel slipped to 32%
- Fanatics added a point to reach 9%, holding its podium spot
- BetMGM added a point to get back to 8%
- Caesars at 5%
- Bet365 at 4% across the 15 trackable states, but a 7% share in the 11 states where it operates, and rising
- theScore Bet (which replaced ESPN Bet in December) continuing to give back share as expected
The theScore Bet decline is the cautionary tale of the group. ESPN Bet peaked at 6% of trackable US handle in December 2023, the first full month after Penn switched the brand from Barstool Sportsbook. It fell to 3% within four months and stayed there through the ESPN-Penn split in December. theScore employees were among the roughly 75 Penn cut from its interactive division earlier this month. Brand and marketing spend, the lesson runs, do not durably buy handle share if the underlying product and economics do not hold.
The World Cup as a slow-season bet
For operators, the tournament's timing is the appeal. June and July are the slowest months of the betting calendar, with the NBA and NHL finished and the NFL still months away. Soccer has represented about 5% of US handle over the last two years, peaking at 8% to 9% in the summer when basketball drops off. Fanatics reports that only 4.7% of its soccer handle comes from MLS, which tells you how little of the existing soccer audience is domestic-league driven and how much room a global event has to expand it.
The growth question is whether operators can pull in bettors who do not normally wager on soccer. King's comparison is March Madness: "If you watch soccer and have any inclination to bet, you're probably already betting on it. But, similar to March Madness, you definitely get people who are bettors that don't normally follow college basketball who will make a bet, because they are following March Madness. I think you'll get that here." The World Cup, in other words, is an acquisition event more than a handle-from-existing-customers event, which is exactly why every major operator is willing to spend into a typically dead season to win signups now.
What this means for bettors
If you live in a legal sports-betting state, this changes little for you directly. You can already bet the World Cup on a regulated sportsbook with deeper soccer markets, live in-play betting, and (often) better pricing than a binary event contract. Prediction markets are a thinner product for the experienced soccer bettor: binary yes/no contracts do not replicate the depth of an Asian-handicap or both-teams-to-score menu. Our best sportsbooks for the World Cup ranking and futures hub are the better starting points if you have a licensed book available.
If you live in California, Texas, Georgia, or Florida, this is the most relevant World Cup betting development of the year. Prediction markets are, for now, the only legal way to take a position on the tournament from home in those states. Fanatics will be the only platform carrying official FIFA marks, but it will not be the only platform: Kalshi, Polymarket, PrizePicks, and DraftKings will all offer World Cup event contracts. As with sportsbooks, the right move is to compare. Liquidity (how easily you can enter and exit a position), spread (the gap between yes and no prices, which is the platform's effective margin), and any loyalty value like FanCash all vary by platform. The official-FIFA branding is a marketing signal, not a pricing advantage.
One note of caution that applies to every platform here: event contracts are a newer, federally regulated product, and the regulatory picture is still moving. Several states have challenged the sports-event-contract workaround, and the CFTC's posture has shifted over the past two years. The products are live and legal today in states without sports betting, but the ground underneath them is less settled than a state-licensed sportsbook. Size positions accordingly.
Our take
The Fanatics deal is the cleanest resolution available to the puzzle FIFA created in April. By naming an Abu Dhabi firm with no US license its official prediction-markets partner, FIFA effectively guaranteed that the official US product would have to come through a domestic broker. Fanatics, with a CFTC-exchange relationship via Crypto.com and a consumer app already in market, was the logical home for it.
The deeper story is the one King is telling about the long game. DraftKings and FanDuel are about to spend half a billion dollars combined to win prediction-market customers in the states their sportsbooks cannot reach. Fanatics is betting that an integrated loyalty loop (FanCash spanning betting, prediction markets, and merchandise) plus official FIFA branding can win the casual World Cup audience without matching that spend. Whether that is disciplined or simply outgunned is the question the next six months will answer. The handle-share trend (Fanatics holding a podium spot at 9% to 10% against far larger ad budgets) suggests the loyalty strategy has real pull. The World Cup, hitting in the dead of the betting off-season with an enormous untapped casual audience, is the best possible stage to test it.
Source: Sports Business Journal, "SBJ Betting: Fanatics' World Cup move" by Bill King (May 29, 2026), including comments from Fanatics Betting and Gaming CEO Matt King and SBJ's first-quarter handle-share tracking across 15 reporting states. Market structure and bettor-facing analysis are our own editorial commentary. This article is informational and not betting advice.