The category of prediction markets may be new to cricket, writes Eddie Fitzgibbon, but the tension between money, uncertainty, and trust is not.

 

I've spent weeks thinking about this topic, and I'll be honest: I'm not fully resolved on where prediction markets sit in cricket's future. The innovation case is real. So is the risk. This piece is my attempt to think through the tension clearly for cricket, and I'd genuinely welcome other perspectives.

This is the 15th in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. Read part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part ten, part 11, part 12, part 13 and part 14 get more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Cricket has seen this movie before.

No, not prediction markets specifically. Those are newer, shinier, and wrapped in the language of financial markets: price discovery, peer-to-peer trading, information efficiency. But the underlying tension – what happens when more and more money attaches itself to uncertain sporting outcomes – is something cricket knows intimately.

I learned that long before anyone in sport was talking about Polymarket, Kalshi, event contracts, or the financialisation of everything.

Back when I was working at the ICC, anti-corruption protocols were not some abstract governance box to tick. They were part of the operating reality of the sport. Member boards had to review documentation. Processes had to be followed. People had to be educated. Risks had to be considered in advance, not after the fact. The same was true years later when I worked on the Cricket All-Stars event in New York. These were retired players. A nostalgia product. An exhibition with legends. And yet players still had to sign anti-corruption forms and go through integrity-related procedures.

Cricket has been living with betting-adjacent risk for so long that even its exhibition products need governance rails.

That is why prediction markets are such an interesting test for the sport.

The bull case is real. Start there.

Before getting into what makes cricket different, it is worth understanding why smart people are paying serious attention to this category, and indeed why dismissing it as betting with better branding would be too easy.

Prediction markets are not exactly the same as traditional sportsbooks. A bookmaker sets the odds, takes the other side of the wager, and makes money by building margin into the price. A prediction market presents itself as a peer-to-peer exchange where users buy and sell positions against one another, with prices moving as information, conviction, and liquidity flow through the system. Proponents say that the product is not just gambling. It is probability, information, and belief turned into something tradeable.

That distinction is the entire reason investors, regulators, media operators, and sports businesses are paying attention.

The bull case is that prediction markets merge the logic of Wall Street, social media, and live sport into one product. They could create a fan-participation layer that feels more interactive, more social, and more transparent than betting against a house. They could drive engagement during under-monetised bilateral windows and lower-attention matches. They could become part of the media layer around sport, where prices act as live signals of what communities believe is likely. And they could create forms of participation that sit adjacent to the game rather than directly inside it.

The bear case is that this may still amount to gambling, just wrapped in a smarter interface and a friendlier legal theory.

The early evidence is not entirely reassuring for the optimists. On Kalshi, roughly 90 percent of trading volume is now sports-related, barely a year after the platform began offering sports futures. Whatever the theoretical distinction between a prediction market and a sportsbook, the revealed preference of actual users suggests the gap may be narrower than the proponents imply.

Both arguments contain truth. The question is which one applies more in any given sport, and that depends entirely on history, economics, and institutional readiness.

This is where Alicia comes in

Alicia, our hypothetical new fan from previous articles, is not sitting around waiting for cricket to explain itself in a neat onboarding deck. She is cricket-curious, not cricket-committed. She scrolls through politics, culture, creator content, celebrity news, market chatter, and internet noise all in the same feed. One day she sees a prediction market on her local election. A few posts later, one on an awards show. Then, somewhere in that stream, she sees cricket. Maybe not a pure match outcome. Maybe something more cultural and narrative-led. A captaincy call. A major return from injury. A superstar media moment.

She clicks not because she has become a cricket purist, but because the mechanic is already familiar and the topic has suddenly become legible.

For a sport that still has real onboarding friction in new markets, prediction-market mechanics could become one more on-ramp into cricket culture. They could turn passive curiosity into active participation. They could make cricket feel less like a rulebook and more like a live, internet-native ecosystem.

That possibility is real.

The U.S. is running the experiment

The U.S. is not dabbling here. MLB’s March 2026 deal with Polymarket matters because it did two things at once: it commercialised the category and tried to wrap it in integrity infrastructure through the CFTC, the U.S. regulator overseeing these markets.

Prediction markets are moving out of the novelty bucket and into the sports-business mainstream. The NHL and MLS help confirm the trend. MLB defines it.

Zoom out 15 to 20 years and it is not difficult to imagine prediction markets becoming a normal part of the broader sports ecosystem. Not just around who wins a match, but around the cultural layer that increasingly surrounds sport: selection debates, awards, transfers, injuries, narratives, and all the noise that now drives attention almost as much as the event itself.

That future is not guaranteed. But it is plausible enough that cricket should be thinking about it now.

But cricket is not a blank-sheet sport

It is not the NFL. It is not the NBA. It is not Major League Baseball.

Those leagues came into the modern sports-betting boom from a different baseline. In the U.S., legal sports betting only accelerated after the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in 2018. Prediction markets are rising inside an American sports economy that has only recently rediscovered how lucrative wagering can be, and is still arguing over where gambling ends and financial innovation begins.

Cricket, by contrast, brings scar tissue into this conversation.

This is a sport that has repeatedly had its integrity tested by gambling-linked corruption, information leakage, and spot-fixing.

More recently, anti-corruption charges linked to the lower-profile Bim10 tournament in Barbados showed that this is not ancient history.

Anti-corruption in cricket is not a side topic or a compliance flourish. It is part of the operating system. The ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit was created in 2000 and continues to treat corruption as a live threat to the game, as it should.

At the top of cricket’s pyramid, money is abundant. Lower down, it often is not. That gap creates pressure points and incentives for smaller leagues, weaker ecosystems, and more fragile operators to accept commercial relationships that richer parts of the game might reject. Cricket’s economics are far more uneven, global, and fragmented than those of the major American leagues.

So even if prediction markets are structurally different from sportsbooks, cricket cannot judge them by structure alone.

Different product structure. Same integrity bar.

Cricket does not need to dismiss the category. But it should be considerably more careful than the louder parts of the American sports-business ecosystem are likely to be.

The revenue question cricket cannot ignore

One useful snapshot of how early this still is for cricket: on Kalshi’s platform, cricket barely registers relative to American football, basketball, and baseball.

Yet cricket already underpins one of the largest speculative ecosystems in global sport. Put together, legal and underground markets suggest that global cricket betting probably now sits somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars a year, with some forecasts implying a path toward $50 billion-plus annually. From regulated sportsbooks in the UK and Australia to the enormous unregulated markets across South Asia, speculation on cricket outcomes is not new. It is already massive, deeply embedded, and largely operating outside the control of the sport’s governing bodies.

The point is not that cricket lacks demand for speculation. It is that prediction markets have barely penetrated that demand. They remain U.S.-skewed, structurally underbuilt for cricket, and far smaller than the betting culture already surrounding the sport. That gap is simultaneously the opportunity and the warning.

For governing bodies facing revenue pressure, prediction-market partnerships look like a middle path: a modern sponsorship category, a new data-commercialisation layer, a way to participate in the trading economy around sport without formally doubling down on sportsbooks. MLB’s deal with Polymarket includes exclusive access to logos and official data via Sportradar, paired with CFTC information-sharing and explicit restrictions on higher-risk market types such as individual pitches, manager decisions, and umpire performance. The emerging American lesson: if the market is going to exist anyway, govern it commercially rather than merely complain about it.

But the American playbook is not portable in a simple way. U.S. leagues operate from a more centralised, better-paid, and more tightly controlled base. Cricket is global, fragmented, and economically uneven. It may eventually decide it would rather sit inside the control room than outside the building. But it should move later and with much narrower boundaries.

Boards should also be honest about what drives the timing. If media-rights values come under strain, if distributions tighten, these partnerships will become more tempting. Not because everyone has suddenly changed their moral view of gambling, but because commercial stress has a way of making uncomfortable categories look innovative. The crypto sponsorship wave of 2020-21 is instructive here.

The tension is live right now in Australia. Cricket Australia is weighing whether to chase significantly more wagering revenue, or sell stakes in BBL clubs, or both. CA has historically been conservative about expanding betting markets on cricket, partly because of the sport’s integrity history, and partly because the BBL is positioned as family entertainment. And CA is not alone in that caution. In England, Premier League clubs have agreed to remove gambling sponsors from the front of matchday shirts from the 2026/27 season. In Australia, gambling advertising around live sport is already restricted on broadcast and streaming platforms. Even established betting markets are no longer treating gambling’s place inside sport as settled.

But financial pressure has a way of making previously uncomfortable categories look more palatable. This is exactly the scenario where a prediction market partnership, structured along the lines of what MLB has done with Polymarket, could offer CA a credible middle path: a new commercial category, framed around engagement and probability rather than traditional wagering, paired with integrity infrastructure and clear product boundaries. It wouldn’t eliminate the political risk. But it might give CA a way to access a modern revenue stream without formally crossing into the spot-betting territory that cricket has rightly kept at arm’s length.

The India problem

India, the sport’s commercial engine, makes this conversation even more consequential. For years, the key legal distinction in Indian gaming law was the line between games of skill and games of chance. That gave fantasy products like Dream11 a defensible argument.

Prediction markets are a much harder fit. Once a product collapses into a simple yes-or-no position on an external outcome, it becomes far easier to characterise as wagering. India’s policy direction has recently become more restrictive, not less. The 2025 online gaming law was framed around prohibiting online money games. Even fantasy, long defended on skill-based grounds, has faced significant legal and political backlash. If products built on skill-based arguments can be materially disrupted, then products built around direct event speculation face an even higher bar. In cricket’s most important market, real-money event speculation sits on unstable ground.

Raj knows what this looks like from the inside

Raj, our hypothetical player from previous articles, sits closer to the game. He understands what cricket’s integrity history feels like from the inside. He knows that products which look harmless from the outside can create very real pressure once money, information asymmetry, and vulnerable participants enter the system. In cricket, the distance between a fun product idea and an integrity concern can be much shorter than outsiders expect. He does not need another founder deck telling him a product is innovative. And the early numbers are not comforting: recent data suggests the median prediction-market bettor loses seven times as much in their first 90 days as they do on other forms of gambling. The product may be structurally novel. The outcomes for participants are not.

Raj needs to know where the lines are, who is watching them, and whether the people building these systems understand what cricket has already lived through.

Alicia is the growth case. Raj is the governance case.

Any serious future for prediction markets in cricket has to satisfy both.

The real question is simpler and harder than whether prediction markets are betting or not betting:

Can these products exist in or around cricket without weakening trust in the game?

If the answer is no, nothing else matters.

If the answer is maybe, then cricket should not rush to monetise first and govern later. It should do what it rarely gets enough credit for doing in this area: be boring, serious, and infrastructure-led. Official data. Monitoring. Clear participant rules. Education. Anti-corruption oversight. Product boundaries. Red lines around certain market types. Stronger thinking about what belongs on the field, what can sit adjacent to the field, and what should not be touched at all.

The real investment thesis may sit in the integrity stack

This is where one of the most commercially interesting recent developments comes in. On March 10, Polymarket announced a partnership with Palantir Technologies and TWG AI to build sports-integrity tooling around trade monitoring, anomaly detection, and compliance. That matters for two reasons.

First, it confirms that the category’s own builders understand their legitimacy problem. As TWG AI’s Drew Cukor framed it, integrity cannot be bolted on after the fact; it has to be engineered into the foundation of how an exchange operates. Polymarket partnering with Palantir – a company with two decades of government and enterprise-grade surveillance experience – signals that the industry knows integrity is not a marketing line. It is a prerequisite for institutional trust. Kalshi has made parallel moves.

Second, and this is where cricket investors should pay close attention: the integrity layer may be where the smarter long-term value sits. The obvious temptation will always be the consumer-facing platform. But in a sport with cricket’s history, the picks-and-shovels layer around the market, including integrity systems, surveillance infrastructure, official data feeds, and compliance tooling may ultimately be more valuable, and more durable, than the market itself.

Consider what a serious integrity stack for cricket would actually need. MLB can partner with Sportradar and layer on a CFTC memorandum because it operates a single, centralised, well-funded league in one country. Cricket would need integrity infrastructure that works across multiple governing bodies, dozens of leagues with wildly different economic profiles, jurisdictions from India to the Caribbean to the UAE, and participation tiers where the gap between top-level and grassroots is enormous. The monitoring systems built for American sports are a useful template. They are not a sufficient one. Cricket’s integrity architecture would need to be more distributed, more multilingual, more attuned to the specific vulnerabilities of fragmented, lower-resourced environments, and far more connected to the ICC’s existing Anti-Corruption Unit infrastructure.

That is not a reason to avoid the space. It is a reason to believe that whoever builds the integrity infrastructure for cricket’s speculative ecosystem is building something genuinely hard to replicate.

The land grab Is already on

Once capital smells a new regulated wedge, every adjacent operator piles in. Fanatics (approx $32B valuation) is in. Novig recently raised $75 million. Businesses like DraftKings, FanDuel, Coinbase and Robinhood have entered prediction markets. Kalshi and Polymarket are each reportedly targeting $20 billion valuations. Trading volume across prediction markets grew from $9 billion in 2024 to over $44 billion in 2025. That does not mean the whole thing is froth. But cricket should assume this conversation will get louder, faster, and more commercial from here.

The window for setting terms, rather than accepting them, is narrowing. If cricket waits until prediction-market operators are already embedded in its commercial ecosystem, the leverage shifts. The time to build frameworks, for data, for integrity, for market boundaries, for participant rules, is before the deals start arriving, not after.

Watch everything. Rush nothing.

The United States is already running this experiment in public, across courts, leagues, regulators, and capital markets. The legal theory is still being tested. The regulatory posture is still evolving. Product boundaries are not settled. Public opinion is still forming. This is not a resolved category. It is a live experiment.

Cricket does not need to be the test case.

The rational move is not indifference, but disciplined observation. Watch the legal fight. Watch how leagues structure these deals. Watch which market types survive. Watch whether fans treat these products as meaningfully different from sportsbooks. Watch whether the promised integrity safeguards actually work.

And if the market keeps moving this way, maybe cricket eventually decides that engagement from inside the system is better than distance from outside it. But if it does, it should do so with narrower rules, tougher standards, and far less self-delusion.

Because cricket does not get the luxury of treating this like a clean-sheet innovation story.

It has history. It has scar tissue. It has global reach, uneven economics, and decades of hard-earned institutional memory about what happens when money gets too close to uncertainty without the right guardrails in place.

Cricket should watch all of it.

But it should not confuse watching with welcoming, novelty with progress, or commercial pressure with strategic clarity.

If prediction markets are going to become part of the future sports stack, then cricket’s job is not to be first.

It is to be smart enough not to repeat its own past while everyone else is busy calling the future.

I’m genuinely unsure where this lands for cricket. Let me know what you think.

Further Reading

For a deeper dive on the broader prediction markets category, Pat Berisha at Sporting Crypto has put together an excellent State of Prediction Markets report. And because this space is moving fast, Predicted is also worth following for regular updates.

Update: Since this was written, the U.S. political backlash has accelerated fast. Seven bills have been introduced in Congress in a single week, including one that would ban sports event contracts outright. More than 20 lawsuits are in play. Insider trading allegations have surfaced on both Kalshi and Polymarket. Neither platform's regulatory position is settled, and legal experts expect the issue to reach the Supreme Court. For cricket, the case for caution just got stronger.