Sports Betting
Operators, platforms, and the global sportsbook market.
The American Gaming Association expects Americans to bet $29.5 billion legally on the 2026 NFL season, up barely at all on last year's $29.4 billion. Its chief executive says the reason is "backdoor sports betting" on prediction markets, and the numbers it cites for Novig, Rothera and Underdog explain why.
The operator's own state list now reads 18, and West Virginia is the addition. It is one of only a handful of states where the casino product can travel with the sportsbook.
Answering three members of Congress, the MLBPA said it proposed a joint lobbying effort against in-game performance props and event contracts, and that Major League Baseball would not join it.
The league confirmed three multi-year sportsbook deals on Thursday, five months after the category emptied. The most consequential line is the one about who is not in them.
FanDuel, DraftKings and Caesars all walked away from the category this year and it sat vacant through the summer. Fanatics has taken it on a non-exclusive deal, and the reason the others left has not gone anywhere.
The Esports Foundation has pushed its inaugural national-teams tournament back a full year, citing the wider regional situation. Riyadh keeps the event and the development money keeps flowing, but the esports betting calendar has just lost its biggest new fixture of 2026.
A tribal coalition is pressing ahead with a California sports betting ballot initiative aimed at the 2028 election cycle, targeting the world's fifth-largest economy and one of the last major US markets to remain closed to regulated wagering. The campaign would give licensed tribal casinos and four major tracks exclusive control over online and retail sports betting.
Three plaintiffs have filed a federal complaint against DraftKings and affiliated entity Gus III, LLC in the District of Massachusetts, the latest legal challenge to land against a major US operator as prediction markets reshape the competitive landscape. The filing adds to a growing body of litigation testing the legal boundaries of sports-event contracts under US gambling law.
Regulated sports wagering in Ontario climbed 6% to CA$1.03bn in June, breaking the usual summer lull, as the expanded FIFA World Cup drove record activity even while operators' revenue slipped.
A post-tournament review from B2B supplier DATA.BET offers one of the first detailed reads on how the first 48-team World Cup was actually bet: France drew the most interest, in-play held a steady share, and the knockout rounds outweighed a much larger group stage.
A Council of Europe-backed integrity body says it identified seven possible betting irregularities across the 2026 World Cup's 104 matches, days after FIFA's own task force reported finding none. The group cautions that its findings are not proof of match-fixing.
North Carolina's newly signed budget lifts the online sports-betting tax from 18% to 23% of gross wagering revenue and creates a 6% tax on prediction-market operators, the first state levy of its kind. The higher rate makes North Carolina one of the costlier US markets for licensed sportsbooks.