Comments on the CFTC’s public-interest rulemaking for prediction markets show leagues and player unions pushing for betting-style safeguards around sports event contracts, including limits on injury, officiating and certain player-specific markets
Major sports leagues and player unions used comments on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s prediction market public-interest rulemaking to press for tighter safeguards around sports event contracts. The comment period closed July 27.
The filings do not amount to a unified demand to ban all sports contracts from CFTC-regulated prediction markets. Instead, they show sports organizations trying to push pieces of the state sports-betting integrity framework into federal derivatives regulation, including league notice, emergency review procedures, prohibited-trader lists, reliable data standards, material nonpublic information rules, athlete protections and limits on certain player-specific markets.
The CFTC’s proposal would rewrite Regulation 40.11, the rule governing event contracts that may be deemed contrary to the public interest because they involve gaming, war, terrorism, assassination or unlawful activity. For sports, the proposal would not impose a categorical ban. It would instead create a contract-by-contract framework that generally treats objectively settled, aggregate outcomes more favorably than contracts tied to injuries, officiating, discrete in-game actions, altercations or youth sports.
That framework drew responses from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA, Major League Soccer (MLS), the ATP Tour and professional athlete unions. Their comments varied in tone and legal posture, but they shared a central concern: If sports event contracts remain available through federally regulated exchanges, the CFTC should decide not only which contracts may trade, but also what integrity, data-sharing and consumer-protection rules should follow them.
Sports groups seek limits on high-risk contracts
The sports comments repeatedly targeted the same types of contracts:
- Markets tied to injuries
- Officiating decisions
- Actions by individual players
- Youth or college athletes
- Information that might be known before the broader market can react
In a July 27 letter reviewed by DeFi Rate but not yet posted to the public comment portal, where only a notice of a meeting with NFL representatives appeared as of Wednesday morning, the NFL urged the CFTC to turn some of those concerns into categorical prohibitions. The league said the agency should “expressly prohibit the listing, trading, or clearing” of contract categories it identifies as “particularly susceptible to manipulation or that raise other public policy concerns.”
The league also asked the CFTC to address what it called “Knowable in Advance” contracts, including markets based on “the first play of a game, coaching decisions, and roster or personnel decisions.” The NFL said those contracts are “among the contracts most susceptible to manipulation” and “directly threaten the integrity” of its games.
NCAA wants individual athlete contract prohibition
MLS, whose commercial arm named Polymarket an official partner of MLS and Leagues Cup in the U.S. earlier this year, offered a sport-specific example from soccer. The league said it has worked with state gaming regulators to prohibit markets on whether a player will receive a yellow card or red card, “because such markets pose integrity concerns.” MLS asked the CFTC to create a similar mechanism for leagues to raise concerns before or after the Commission’s proposed 10-day review window.
The ATP Tour similarly supported the CFTC’s factor-based approach. However, it said some contract types should not be traded freely. In tennis, ATP said contracts involving player injuries, player retirement and officiating decisions “will always be contrary to the public interest and should be prohibited outright.”
The NCAA went further for college sports, urging the CFTC to bar individual student-athlete event contracts entirely. The NCAA said those contracts concentrate settlement risk on one athlete and can be influenced by “coaches, trainers, NIL agents or medical staff.” That could create manipulation and oversight concerns. It concluded that individual student-athlete event contracts “should not be permitted to be listed for trading on CFTC-registered exchanges.”
Player unions seek safety and privacy protections
Professional athlete unions framed the issue less around market structure than athlete safety. In a joint comment, the NFL Players Association, MLB Players Association, National Basketball Players Association, NHL Players’ Association and MLS Players Association said that, if the CFTC allows sports-related event contracts to keep trading, it should adopt protections “akin to those in place under state regulatory regimes.”
The unions said player safety concerns have grown as sports betting has expanded across the country. Even with existing protections, they wrote, “there are still many instances where fans blame a lost bet on players and resort to abusive and harassing behavior.” Multiple athletes have spoken publicly about that harassment and its impact on their families and mental health, the unions said.
Their requested safeguards included a complete ban on contracts based on negative outcomes or outcomes that can be manipulated by a single person. The unions pointed to mention markets, contracts tied to whether an athlete is injured or penalized, and contracts based on whether an athlete finishes below a stated statistical threshold.
They also called for a petition process to remove prohibited or otherwise problematic contracts, a transparent list of “bad actors” barred from participating in event contracts, and venue fan-conduct policies prohibiting prediction market-related harassment.
The unions also pushed the CFTC to address athlete data and due process. They said the growth of sports betting and prediction markets has increased demand for nonpublic information tied to athletes’ health, performance metrics and biometric data, warning that the failure to add protections could create “fundamental invasions of privacy.” If leagues share information about potential misconduct with the CFTC or exchanges, the unions said, affected athletes and their representatives should receive the same information at the same time.
Leagues seek formal role in market oversight
Beyond limits on specific contract types, leagues also asked the CFTC to give sports governing bodies a continuing role in how sports event contracts are reviewed, monitored and policed.
The NBA said the proposal’s inclusion of certain integrity-related information-sharing provisions “falls well short” of requiring prediction market companies to follow basic sports-integrity protections. Those protections, the league said, should include cooperation with league investigations, notice to leagues about suspicious trading or prohibited trading by league personnel, and consultation with leagues on new player proposition markets.
“With respect to new markets in particular,” the NBA wrote, “we continue to believe that leagues are best positioned to determine which markets pose outsized integrity risks or are susceptible to manipulation.”
The NBA also urged the CFTC to require exchanges to block athletes, officials and other league or team personnel from trading contracts tied to their own leagues, using lists provided by the leagues. It also called for robust know-your-customer requirements so sports contracts cannot be traded anonymously. The league also asked for a 21-and-over age floor or, at minimum, marketing restrictions for 18-to-20-year-olds.
MLB wants further coverage
MLB, which named Polymarket its exclusive prediction market exchange partner and signed the CFTC’s first memorandum of understanding with a professional sports league in March, similarly praised the proposal’s emphasis on collaboration and information sharing. But MLB said that framework should apply to sports-related event contracts even when they do not settle on what happens in a game.
The league pointed to contracts based on an athlete’s personal or legal affairs, team personnel decisions, press conference comments or a celebrity’s attendance at a sporting event as examples of markets that could raise manipulation, insider-trading and league-policy concerns.
For sports contracts that do fall within Regulation 40.11, MLB said a league’s opposition should receive greater weight in the CFTC’s public-interest review. The league suggested the Commission could treat opposition from a relevant league or sports governing body as a primary negative factor, adding that “a league’s affirmative opposition to a particular event contract should weigh heavily” in the agency’s determination.
CFTC must decide what follows sports contract approval
The league and union comments leave the CFTC with a question that goes beyond whether contracts tied to sports outcomes can trade on a federally regulated exchange. They ask the agency to decide how much of the sports-betting regulatory model should follow those contracts into prediction markets.
Some of that debate turns on market plumbing. Comments from sports data providers and integrity monitors pushed the CFTC to address reliable settlement data, transaction monitoring, suspicious-activity reporting and formal information sharing with sports governing bodies. But the comments also showed disagreement over how prescriptive the agency should be, including whether sports contracts should rely on official league data or broader reliability standards.
Those operational questions are playing out inside a wider jurisdictional fight over whether sports event contracts are federally regulated derivatives or state- and tribal-regulated sports wagering products. Prediction market operators have argued that contracts listed on CFTC-regulated exchanges fall under exclusive federal oversight, while state regulators, tribal gaming interests and sportsbook-aligned groups have pushed back against what they view as a federally regulated path around state gambling laws.
For leagues and player unions, the rulemaking is not only about that legal boundary. Their comments ask the CFTC to decide not only which sports contracts may trade, but also what oversight, data-sharing, consumer-protection and athlete-safety rules should follow if sports event contracts remain available through federally regulated markets.
