00:00And wouldn't you know that the National Football League actually makes a statement against something that has to do with the idea of sports betting?
00:09And I say the idea of because, again, these companies like Kalshi and Robinhood and Crypto.com, they don't want to be known as sports betting companies.
00:17They want to be known as prediction companies.
00:19But it's a very fine line between the two.
00:22And the National Football League says, no, no, no, no, no.
00:25You prediction companies are sports betting companies.
00:28You got to pay your taxes.
00:29You got to pay for all the info and the data.
00:31What gives, Sam?
00:33How is this all going to work out?
00:35Yeah, it is a very fine line right now, at least from a legal standpoint, between sports prediction markets and actual sports betting.
00:44They look very similar, but fundamentally, they want to be classified or treated differently so they can follow different rules.
00:51And for prediction markets, that means being able to be in 50 states, not having any of these protections a lot of the sports books have.
00:57And the NFL came out this week and said, you know, kind of to clarify where things stand, is we're treating sports prediction markets right now like gambling, at least until the CFTC weighs in, until there's more of a clear kind of landscape.
01:10Because right now it's very unclear, it's very murky if this is sports betting, if it's not, who regulates it?
01:16And there's obviously been a bunch of lawsuits.
01:18So the NFL said that the same rules that apply to sports betting for its players, you know, that don't allow a player to bet on the NFL, that don't allow a player to use a sports betting app or make a bet if you're at a team facility or if you're on the road performing duties for the team, those same rules apply to sports prediction markets as well.
01:37The NFL, you know, maintaining that they believe that these markets have largely been unchecked, they're worried that they can just launch kind of whatever they want to with the self certification process.
01:49Of course, you have companies like Koushi and Robin Hood are offering not just spreads on NFL games this year, but touchdown props as well, next team props, season long futures, basically everything that you really see out of sports book.
02:02And this is the first year they're doing that remember, they started with the Super Bowl last year. And since then, it's been a really booming business from them. So we're only going to see more and more of that attention from the prediction markets this year, you're going to see a lot more commercials, a lot more advertisements.
02:18So the NFL wanting to come out and kind of clarify where things stand. Now, one question I had after the NFL made this announcement, the NFL was very adamant about they have these relationships with sports books where they share league data, where the sports books share things with them.
02:34It's one of the reasons that Calvin Ridley was identified, for example, when he was placing bets on FanDuel is because FanDuel has that relationship with the league, they work with integrity monitoring services, but right now sports prediction markets don't really have any of those protections in place.
02:49So I'm wondering, you know, if a player is betting on the NFL with a sports prediction market, how is the league going to identify that? How is the league going to monitor that? How is a prediction market even responsible for reporting that it's a lot of questions we have around this new kind of burgeoning business, which really is operating without a lot of guardrails.
03:09And the NFL, again, is one of those leagues, along with the MLB, along with the NBA, that have really advocated and asked the CFTC to put these guardrails in place and really identified why they're important.
03:20Some of these issues we're talking about. So we'll have to see if the CFTC ever weighs in. But for now, the NFL saying until they do, we're going to treat this as gambling just for our purposes. So things aren't complicated.
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