The NFL Brings DraftKings and FanDuel Back and Locks Out Prediction Markets

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.

• The National Football League announced multi-year partnerships with DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics on 27 August, restoring a sponsorship category that had been empty since the previous agreements expired at the end of March
• DraftKings returns as an official sportsbook and odds provider, keeping the official daily fantasy sports designation it has held since 2019; FanDuel returns as an official betting operator; Fanatics is an official betting operator and official online casino marketing partner, taking the slot Caesars vacated
• The deals carry official league data distributed by Genius Sports, advertising rights running to roughly one spot per quarter, and league and team intellectual property, with financial terms undisclosed
• Prediction markets are expressly excluded from the data and intellectual property rights, with the league saying it is not a space it is considering commercially at present
• It confirms and extends the non-exclusive Fanatics agreement iGaming Times reported on 21 August, which left the league free to add partners before the season

Two of the Three Who Walked Away Have Come Back

The category the NFL created in 2021 sat vacant from the end of March, when the agreements with Caesars, DraftKings and FanDuel all lapsed together. That was the first gap since the league started selling sportsbook sponsorship, and reporting at the time identified the cost of official streaming data supplied by Genius Sports, the league's exclusive distributor, as the sticking point in the renewals.

Thursday's announcement resolves it for two of the three. DraftKings comes back as an official sportsbook and odds provider and retains the official daily fantasy sports partnership it has held since 2019. FanDuel comes back as an official betting operator. Fanatics, whose arrival iGaming Times reported on 21 August, is confirmed as an official betting operator and as the league's official online casino marketing partner. Caesars has not returned.

The package is described as multi-year, with terms undisclosed. Partners receive official league data distributed by Genius Sports, in-game advertising rights amounting to approximately one advertisement per quarter, and the right to use league and team marks. The agreements also commit the parties to work together on bet types, integrity measures and responsible gambling. The league continues to prohibit wagers tied to officiating decisions, injuries, and outcomes it judges susceptible to manipulation.

FanDuel president Christian Genetski framed the renewal around the industry the partnership has helped build, saying it has contributed to a legal and regulated sports betting industry that puts fans and the integrity of the game at the centre.

The detail that matters most is a carve-out. The league has excluded prediction markets from both the data rights and the intellectual property rights in these agreements, and its representative said plainly that it is not a space the NFL is considering commercially at this point.

The Carve-Out Is the Most Valuable Thing in the Deal

Every one of these three partners either operates in prediction markets or has told investors it intends to. DraftKings has been restructuring around prediction markets as they scale and preparing its own entry into the category, while event-contract venues have spent the year arguing that they are federally regulated derivatives platforms rather than sportsbooks. The NFL has now drawn the line commercially rather than legally: whatever a court eventually decides about the Commodity Exchange Act, a prediction market cannot buy official league data or use the shield. That is a meaningful asset to withhold, because the single hardest thing for an event-contract venue to replicate is the legitimacy that comes with official designation. It also tells the exchanges what the league thinks of them while carefully avoiding any position on the litigation.

The Genius Sports Bill Got Paid, Which Tells You What the Category Is Worth

The renewals stalled for five months over data cost, and both holdouts have now signed. Nothing suggests Genius Sports moved, so the reasonable inference is that DraftKings and FanDuel concluded that a season without official NFL data and marks was worse than the price. That is a strong signal about the value of official status heading into a season in which their sharpest competition is coming from venues that have no official status at all. It also complicates the argument, made repeatedly this year as sportsbook advertising shifted towards cheaper NBA and MLB inventory, that the operators had permanently repriced football. They repriced it for one off-season and then paid.

Caesars Is the Absence Worth Noting

Three left and two returned. Caesars, which is currently asking its own shareholders to approve a take-private at $31.00 a share and has just accepted a record New Jersey responsible gaming penalty, did not. A company mid-buyout has every reason to avoid committing to multi-year sponsorship spending that a new owner would inherit, so this is not necessarily a judgment on the category. But it does leave the NFL's official roster as two national scale operators plus a retail-and-media company, which is a narrower field than the league had in 2021.

The league has re-let the category and drawn a boundary around it. The boundary will be quoted more often than the deals.