By: Manuel Polanco
When disgraced Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose received a lifetime ban from MLB for betting on games, this established a no-tolerance standard in sports for many years to come. But it seems like the worlds of online prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket, have been integrated into not just baseball but every major sport as well.
Prediction markets are websites where people can trade or bet on any real-world outcome, whether it be sports, politics, or financial investments. To put it simply, if you were to put money on the question, “Is my friend going to get dumped on Saturday at 7 pm?” People could bet on the predictions of yes or no, and whichever event comes true, bettors get a nice win or a payout if things don’t go their way.
Popular markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket have created a normalization of gambling addiction, while setting a dangerous precedent for world events.
Kalshi is a New York-based prediction market. Founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, the market quickly took off and received CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) approval and is allowed to regulate and let people bet on whatever. But what’s the limit on what one can bet on? And how have they infiltrated sports?
Kalshi couldn’t do it without its right-hand website, Polymarket, another prediction market. Polymarket is a private American cryptocurrency-based prediction market where users can bet on future outcomes like sports, the weather , and military conflicts.
Kalshi and Polymarket are two unregulated businesses that let users freely bet on anything, including military conflicts, and shouldn’t have as many athletes cosigning them as they do, yet that is not the case.
If you’ve been paying attention to the sports world in the last four years, then you know the platforming of sportsbooks like DraftKings and Underdog spread like wildfire and ultimately opened the door for the prediction markets to swoop in. You can’t escape Kalshi ads or Polymarket ads in sports media now; when scrolling on TikTok, you’ll be hit with fake sports videos that are disguised as an ad for Kalshi or Polymarket.
The authenticity of sports continues to go down the drain, and the viewers are being bombarded and brainwashed into thinking this is okay. But has any athlete openly supported these markets? You may ask, and well, the answer is yes; a lot of them have.
From NBA stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Ajay Mitchell investing in Kalshi as holders, you also had actor Timothée Chalamet doing an ad for Kalshi this year. But none of these top future Hall of Famer and NBA legend, LeBron James cosigned Polymarket and did a big ad campaign for them.
James’ contract with Polymarket is worth $15 million dollars per year, while he gets paid $3.9 million from the Philadelphia 76ers. Not to mention that James has a net worth of a billion dollars; why would he co-sign a prediction market that has been well documented for war profiteering? And does he really need $19.9 million dollars a year as well?
Letting people bet on military conflicts has led Polymarket into hot water after it was discovered users were placing bets on the Iran war and on the assassination of then-leader Ayatollah Khamenei; a topic covered by Sam Yehia from Orato First-Person News. =
“Polymarket saw more than $529 million wagered not on diplomacy or peace talks, but on when bombs would hit! One trader, ‘Magamyman,’ turned $87,000 into $553,000 just an hour before the news broke, betting on the strikes and the killing of their supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.”
These types of bets can sometimes come from insider trading and people who already have first-hand information on these kinds of ordeals. Human suffering turned into a get-rich-quick scheme, and our own athletes promote the businesses that do so.
“In January, an anonymous Polymarket user made a $400,000 profit by betting that Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro would be out of office, hours before Maduro was captured. In the hours before the start of the Iran war, another account made roughly $550,000 in a series of trades effectively betting that the U.S. would strike Iran and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be removed from office,” reported NPR.
My goal isn’t to preach any holier-than-thou message, but to show that when they see their favorite player do an ad for a prediction market, they’re indirectly supporting others’ suffering while also contributing to the further degradation of sports authenticity.
Gambling and sports have forever been intertwined, but allowing prediction markets into the fold leads to uncertainty about whether or not the product we are viewing is authentically happening or rigged from the start, filling someone else’s pocket.