The 2026 World Cup group stage has delivered spectacular football but far less profit than bookmakers typically expect from a major international tournament.
Bank of America estimates cited by the Financial Times suggest DraftKings may have lost as much as $50m during the opening phase of the competition alone.
Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé all scored twice in the same week, creating a particularly costly combination for operators exposed to multi-leg bets.
Parlays, known as accumulators in the UK, are ordinarily a reliable high-margin product for sportsbooks, requiring multiple outcomes to land before any payout is triggered.
That logic unravelled when bettors backed all three forwards to score at least twice each, an outcome priced at roughly a 1% probability, delivering healthy returns to those who got it right.
Bank of America analyst Julie Hoover said the strong performance of the United States had become “the biggest liability” for most American sportsbooks operating during the tournament.
Flutter reported that its UK customers won £4.1m from England’s 4-2 victory over Croatia, though England’s subsequent goalless draw with Ghana “more than balanced the books.”
Flutter chief executive Peter Jackson recalled losing heavily on Argentina’s 2022 final win over France, but said he still viewed major tournaments as a success because they provided “great entertainment.”
Operators appear willing to absorb short-term losses if the World Cup draws in new customers who can later be introduced to higher-margin products across their platforms.
The revenue bonanza many operators anticipated has not yet materialised, even after significant spending on promotions, in-play products and customer acquisition campaigns.
Elsewhere in the industry, NPR reported that Mark Zuckerberg considered acquiring prediction-market platform Kalshi before Meta decided to pursue its own alternative instead.
Zuckerberg reportedly met Kalshi chief executive Tarek Mansour as the platform’s popularity surged, though the discussions did not progress for reasons that remain disputed between the parties.
Internal documents reviewed by NPR show Meta is developing a standalone prediction-market app called Arena, where users will forecast news events and online trends using play money rather than real cash.
Columbia law professor Tim Wu described the concept as a “casino app with fake money” that may struggle to offer the same appeal as real-money prediction markets currently attracting significant trading volumes.
Wu also noted the project fitted a familiar pattern for Meta, which has previously retreated from initiatives including Libra and the metaverse while continuing to pursue emerging digital trends.
Meta has already partnered with Kalshi to integrate markets into Threads, making the reported acquisition interest likely to revive debate around the company’s broader competitive reputation.
In a separate story, Spotify’s US chart briefly recorded an unlikely number one in “Earrings”, a 2024 indie-pop track by Malcolm Todd, before an investigation removed more than 500,000 streams from the count.
US streams of “Earrings” jumped almost 70% between Sunday and Monday, propelling the song to the top of Spotify’s daily US chart at a moment when Kalshi traders had priced Todd’s chances at just 2.5%.
Spotify concluded that a large number of the streams had been initiated by bots, meaning the track would have finished fourth that Monday rather than first under honest conditions.
Kalshi had already settled the market by that point, handing traders who backed the long-shot outcome returns of roughly 20 times their initial stakes, with suspicious activity first flagged publicly by Kalshi trader Caleb Davies on X.
There is no suggestion that Todd or his team were involved in any attempt to artificially inflate the track’s streaming numbers ahead of the market settlement.
Spotify said it had “best-in-class detection and mitigation practices” and does not pay royalties on manipulated streams, while Kalshi said it was investigating the circumstances surrounding the settlement.
The episode highlights a growing vulnerability in prediction markets: wherever an outcome can be manipulated, there will be financial incentives for someone to attempt exactly that.
