Betting 2.0: Are Prediction Markets About to Change Sports Forever?

Sports betting has changed.

Not that long ago, betting on a football match was pretty simple.

You picked Manchester United to win. You picked Liverpool to win. Maybe a Bruno Fernandes hat trick.

Then came in-play betting, bet builders, player props and micro-betting.

Now there is another challenger entering the arena:

Prediction markets.

Platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket have exploded in popularity, particularly in the US, allowing people to trade contracts based on the outcome of real-world events.

Trading volume is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2030.

And sport is becoming one of the biggest battlegrounds.

But what exactly are prediction markets?

Are they actually different from traditional betting?

And, perhaps most importantly, could they become a serious threat to the £10bn-plus UK betting industry?

Let's break it down.

So, What Actually Is a Prediction Market?

At its simplest, a prediction market allows people to buy and sell contracts based on whether something will happen.

Think of it as a market for future outcomes.

Will Arsenal win the Premier League? Will Manchester City beat Liverpool? Will a particular player score?

The contract might trade at 65p. If the event happens, it pays £1. If it doesn't, it pays nothing.

So the 65p price effectively represents the market's implied probability of the event happening.

And that's where things get interesting.

Traditional bookmakers set the odds.

Prediction markets allow the market to set the price.

The biggest names in the space include Kalshi and Polymarket, which have become particularly prominent in the US.

Kalshi operates as a regulated event-contract exchange in the US, while Polymarket has become one of the best-known crypto-based prediction market platforms.

Sports are increasingly becoming a major part of this growth.

In fact, Kalshi has recently signed partnerships with major US sports teams, including the San Francisco Giants, Atlanta Braves, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres.

That's a pretty big change.

Prediction markets aren't just an interesting financial experiment anymore.

They're starting to enter the sports ecosystem.

Prediction Markets vs Traditional Betting

So what's actually different?

At first glance, not much.

You still put money behind an outcome.

You still win if you're right.

You still lose if you're wrong.

But the underlying model is different.

Traditional sportsbooks such as bet365 or William Hill typically act as the counterparty.

They set the odds, build in a margin and manage their exposure.

Prediction markets work more like financial exchanges.

You're effectively trading against other market participants.

If you think Arsenal have a 70% chance of winning and the market is pricing them at 55%, you can buy the contract.

If the price subsequently moves to 75%, you can potentially sell before the match even finishes.

That makes prediction markets feel much more like trading than traditional gambling.

And this is particularly interesting in the UK.

The UK Gambling Commission has actually said that if current-style prediction markets were launched commercially in Great Britain, they would likely fall within the existing definition of a Betting Intermediary. In other words, the regulator sees the core mechanics as being similar to a betting exchange.

So prediction markets aren't necessarily inventing something completely new.

They're potentially taking an existing concept and packaging it in a much more financial, technology-driven way.

And that's what makes them interesting.

The Data Behind the Revolution

Here's where things get really interesting.

Prediction markets need one thing above everything else:

Data.

Lots of it.

And it needs to be fast.

Very fast.

Imagine a Premier League match.

A striker shoots.

The ball hits the post.

A second later, the market needs to know what happened, update the probability of the next goal, and potentially change hundreds of prices.

That's where companies such as Genius Sports come in.

Genius Sports has become one of the key pieces of infrastructure connecting sport, betting and technology.

The company is the exclusive official live-data distributor for Premier League, English Football League and Scottish Professional Football League matches, collecting and distributing data to sportsbooks globally. Its agreement with Football DataCo covers more than 4,000 games per season, with data distributed in under a second.

Think about that.

A football match is generating thousands of pieces of information.

Shots.

Corners.

Cards.

Possession.

Player movements.

Goals.

Substitutions.

Every one of these events can change the probability of what happens next.

And increasingly, that information is being turned into betting products.

Genius Sports generated $669.5 million of revenue in 2025, up 31% year-on-year.

Even more interestingly, its Betting Technology, Content & Services business generated $471.5 million, up 33%.

That's not prediction-market revenue.

But it tells us something important.

The infrastructure supporting data-driven sports betting is growing rapidly.

And the more sophisticated sports markets become, the more valuable real-time data becomes.

Genius Sports is already using technologies such as AI, computer vision, big data and Monte Carlo modelling to improve the speed and accuracy of sports pricing.

The result?

Sports betting is becoming less about picking a winner before kick-off.

It's becoming about continuously pricing the next five minutes, the next possession, the next shot and the next event.

Prediction markets fit naturally into that world.

So, What Happens Next?

This is probably the most interesting question.

Are prediction markets going to replace sportsbooks?

Probably not.

At least not anytime soon.

The UK already has an enormous and highly regulated betting industry.

Sports betting is available across the country, and the regulatory framework is much more established than in the US.

The Gambling Commission has also made it clear that prediction-market operators cannot simply launch in Britain and claim they aren't gambling businesses.

But that doesn't mean the model can't evolve.

The bigger opportunity could be the convergence of betting, trading and sports data.

Imagine watching Arsenal vs Chelsea.

Instead of simply betting on Arsenal to win, you could trade a contract on whether Arsenal score within the next ten minutes.

Then trade another on whether Bukayo Saka has a shot on target.

Then another on whether there will be a corner in the next five minutes.

The game effectively becomes a live financial market.

And technology is already moving in that direction.

Genius Sports says the rise of micro-betting and richer in-play markets is changing what consumers expect from sportsbooks. Its BetVision product, for example, combines live streams with real-time statistics and integrated betting functionality.

The football match is no longer just something you watch.

It's something you interact with.

That's the real opportunity.

Prediction markets could make sports betting feel less like placing a bet and more like trading an asset.

And for younger, digitally native audiences, that distinction could become increasingly blurred.

There is obviously a major regulatory and responsible-gambling question here too.

If every pass, tackle and corner becomes tradeable, the number of opportunities to wager could explode.

The UK regulator already highlights concerns around in-play betting, particularly the speed at which information can reach different market participants.

So there will be a balance to strike.

But the direction of travel seems pretty clear.

More data.

More markets.

More real-time interaction.

More money flowing around every moment of a sporting event.

Sports betting used to be about predicting who would win.

Now it's becoming about predicting what happens next.

And if prediction markets can successfully combine the liquidity of financial markets, the entertainment of sports and the data of companies like Genius Sports, they could create something much bigger than another way to place a bet.

They could create a completely new financial market built around sport.

And that might be the biggest change sports betting has seen since the arrival of the internet.