The NFL went to the Supreme Court on Thursday, and it did not go there to talk about football.
The league filed an amicus brief in Flaherty v. KalshiEX, LLC, siding with New Jersey gaming regulators against the prediction market operator Kalshi. The NFL’s position is blunt. Sports event contracts sold on prediction markets are gambling, and states should be allowed to regulate them as gambling.
The Argument Comes Down to One Word
Kalshi classifies its sports contracts as swaps, which would place them under the exclusive authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and out of reach of state gambling law. The NFL says they are nothing of the sort.
A swap exists to hedge a financial risk you already carry. A contract on whether a receiver catches a touchdown exposes you to the outcome of a game in which you hold no underlying financial interest. The league leaned on reasoning from the Sixth and Ninth Circuits to draw that line, and it asked the Court to take the case on the grounds that lower courts have split.
The stakes are simple enough. If Kalshi prevails, sports contracts can be offered nationwide under federal oversight, including in states that never legalized sports betting at all. If New Jersey prevails, every platform has to clear 50 separate sets of state rules.
Why the League Actually Cares
Read the specifics and the integrity worry jumps out. Back in March, the NFL asked Kalshi and Polymarket to stop offering contracts tied to individual plays and player injuries, which are precisely the markets one person inside a building could move.
Nothing changed. In a statement to CNBC, the league said neither the CFTC nor the operators have banned categories of bets susceptible to manipulation or set a 21 age limit, “despite our persistent urging.” That is as close as the NFL gets to saying publicly that it does not trust how this market is being policed.
The league has not asked for prediction markets to be shut down. What it wants is the set of guardrails that state-regulated sportsbooks already live with, including restricted contract types, age limits and genuine cooperation with leagues on insider information. Those rules exist because the NFL spent years pushing for them, and it has no appetite for watching a parallel market operate without any of them.
Kalshi Is Not Backing Down
Kalshi rejected the NFL’s framing entirely. The company says it prioritizes market integrity and that the CFTC already polices sports-related markets, and it argues that consistent federal oversight beats a state-by-state patchwork. It also pointed to partnerships it has signed with other leagues.
CFTC chairman Michael Selig has said his agency would defer to the leagues on integrity questions, which sounds accommodating right up until you notice that deference is not a rule. Gaming attorney Daniel Wallach was blunter about the NFL’s legal theory, writing that “this ain’t it.”
Here is the uncomfortable part for the NFL. This is a league that sells sportsbook sponsorships, puts odds on its own broadcasts and built a whole secondary economy on top of legal wagering. Arguing that a different betting product needs tighter supervision is a defensible position, and the league only gets to take it because it already won the last fight.
The Court has not agreed to hear the case yet, and the brief is a push to make sure it does. The NFL would clearly rather answer to 50 regulators who report to state legislatures than to one federal agency that has already signaled it would prefer not to be the referee.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.