The National Football League is once again telling prediction markets to take down sports contracts it believes threaten the integrity of its games.
In a Thursday letter sent ahead of the 2026 season kickoff, NFL Chief Compliance Officer Sabrina Perel told designated contract markets that the league remains “deeply concerned” that contracts in categories it flagged months ago “have been and continue to be listed as contracts on exchanges.”
The NFL sent the letter to operators, including Kalshi and Polymarket US, and copied the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael Selig.
The league’s core message is unchanged. Prediction markets may call these instruments “event contracts,” but the NFL views many of them as objectionable bets and wants them gone.
The NFL’s list is broad
The NFL is asking exchanges to prohibit contracts that it considers especially susceptible to manipulation, inappropriate for fans or participants, or knowable before the public has access to the information.
The categories include:
- Easily manipulable game markets, such as whether a kicker will miss a field goal or whether a quarterback’s first pass will be incomplete.
- Non-game markets, including broadcast-mention contracts and markets on whether a fan or celebrity attends a game.
- Inherently objectionable markets, including player injuries and availability, fan safety and player misconduct.
- Officiating markets, such as the number, timing or type of flags, replay outcomes, officiating actions, and referee assignments.
- Knowable-in-advance markets, including first-play contracts, starting lineup and personnel decisions, player trades and signings, coaching moves, hiring and firing decisions.
The league says allowing those products creates risks not only for the game but also for players, coaches, officials and the people trading on the exchanges.
This is the NFL’s second warning
The Thursday letter is not a new policy position. It is an escalation.
The NFL first wrote to operators in March, asking them to refrain from listing contracts it classified as “easily manipulable,” “inherently objectionable,” officiating-related or knowable in advance.
At the time, NFL Executive Vice President Jeff Miller said the league viewed the categories as broadly comparable to wagers traditional sportsbooks already prohibit.
In May, the league also urged the CFTC to impose stricter nationwide standards for sports-related event contracts. Its recommendations included a ban on specific contract categories, a special certification process for individual-player or manipulation-prone markets, information-sharing arrangements with sports regulators, restrictions on margin trading and a higher minimum participation age of 21.
Then, in late July, the NFL formally pressed the CFTC to go further with its sports contract rulemaking. The league argued that popularity and trading volume are not reasons to permit products it considers harmful or vulnerable to manipulation.
What has changed is the calendar. The NFL season is about to begin, and the league is signaling that voluntary conversations have not sufficiently resolved its concerns.
The language matters
The NFL’s letter repeatedly refers to the products as “bets.”
Prediction market operators and the CFTC have generally argued that event contracts listed on federally regulated designated contract markets are financial products, not state-regulated gambling. The legal fight over that distinction is now active across the country.
New Jersey has asked the United States Supreme Court to decide whether sports-event contracts are federally regulated swaps or sports bets subject to state gaming laws. The petition follows a direct split between the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which sided with Kalshi against New Jersey, and the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that Nevada can regulate Kalshi’s sports contracts as gambling.
The NFL is not merely asking for narrower markets. It takes a position that reinforces the states’ underlying argument: Whatever the legal structure, these are sports wagers with integrity risks, and the operators should handle them as such.
The league also tells exchanges to defer to sports leagues’ expertise. It points to Selig’s public statement that leagues are well positioned to identify contracts vulnerable to manipulation.
A partnership remains unlikely
The NFL has embraced legalized sports betting more broadly, signing deals with major sportsbook operators and integrating betting content into its media ecosystem. But it remains the conspicuous holdout among major North American leagues in terms of formal prediction market partnerships.
Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, UFC and Major League Soccer have all entered relationships with prediction-market companies. Kalshi also recently became the official prediction market app of nine MLB teams. The NFL has said it needs stronger guardrails before it would consider a similar arrangement.
That leaves the prediction markets industry with a difficult pre-kickoff choice.
Operators can take down the contracts the NFL finds objectionable and demonstrate that league input meaningfully governs their sports offerings. Or they can maintain that federal market rules, not private leagues, should determine which contracts are eligible to trade.
The NFL’s letter makes clear that it thinks the first option is overdue.
