COMMENTARY: Well versed in self-promotion, with its much-touted “Flutter Effect”, Flutter Entertainment–best known as the parent company of leading U.S. sports book FanDuel, is having a “moment” with upstart prediction market sites Kalshi, Polymarket and Robinhood yapping at its heels.
For all its lustre–and bluster–Irish-American Flutter’s share price has fallen by some 17 percent over the last year – most markedly since the second ascension of Donald Trump to Washington’s presidential throne.
And the markets don’t lie.
The ruling Trump Organisation, an umbrella of 200 companies run by his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, is deeply embedded with the coming prediction markets industry, that clever legal runaround that allows punters to “predict” and not “bet” because technically they are only playing against themselves in a binary transaction.
Incestuous
Trump Junior, for example, is both a “strategic adviser” to Kalshi and an investor and board member of Polymarket.
Flutter, like DraftKings and all the other traditional iGaming runners, is clearly worried by all these incestuous developments.
How to seize back the Zeitgeist? How to disrupt the disrupters before you crash, burn and have to reform like poor unfortunate ESPN Bet?
Working on the premise that “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em”, both Flutter and DraftKings have come up with the simple solution of launching their own prediction markets: FanDuel Predicts, in conjunction with CME Group, goes live this December and DraftKings Predict, built on the bones of the recently-acquired Railbird, will fly early in the New Year.
California Dreamin’
But these being dynamic iGaming companies led by brilliant businessmen there’s more to their prediction markets push than just heading off hurry-come-up rivals at the pass.
Prediction markets are also the Trojan Horse that–maybe, just maybe–allows them to seize the last two great unconquered iGaming sports betting markets on the American gambling frontier: California and Texas.
Between them the two states hold some 20 percent of the USA’s 340 million people.
If California, The Golden State, were a country it would be the fourth richest nation on earth; Lone Star Texas would probably rank in the top 10.
So California Dreamin’, Texas Hold ‘Em; prediction markets, wearing the borrowed robes of FanDuel and DraftKings, is coming for you – if the law allows.
Watch this space!
