The World Cup is expected to be the biggest sporting event on the planet. It may also become the industry’s biggest chance yet to turn a global sporting spectacle into an engine for speculative trading.
The month-long tournament could generate roughly $3 billion in additional wagers and drive as much as $10 billion in betting volume across sports-betting and prediction-market platforms, according to Bernstein analysts. With more than 100 matches and an expanded field of 48 national teams, the event will increase the amount of “bettable inventory” by roughly 60% compared with prior tournaments, giving platforms a rare surge of activity during a typically quiet period for sports wagering.
For prediction-market operators, the opportunity extends beyond soccer. Sports-related contracts already account for the majority of activity on many event-trading platforms, and executives are betting that marquee tournaments can attract new users who stay long after the final match is played.
The World Cup arrives as the boundaries between investing, betting and trading continue to blur. What began as a niche market for wagering on elections and economic outcomes is increasingly overlapping with sports gambling and crypto trading, creating a fast-growing ecosystem built around speculation itself. Bettors can now put money behind any number of wagers, from where Bitcoin’s price might end up at the end of the month, to what words a politician may utter during a speech.
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That convergence is part of what strategists at Bank of America describe as the “gamification” of markets. They argue the trend is likely to accelerate as prediction markets, digital assets and retail trading platforms increasingly borrow from one another’s playbooks, making it easier for users to place rapid-fire wagers on everything from soccer matches to economic data releases.
The analysts point to the explosive growth of crypto perpetual futures , a type of derivative contract with no expiration date that has become one of the most heavily traded instruments in digital-asset markets. Annual volumes in those contracts now exceed $90 trillion, according to the bank, underscoring the scale of investor appetite for always-on, highly speculative products.
“We expect the lines between finance, crypto, and betting to continue to blur over the coming years, and the culture of speculation continues to accelerate,” the BofA analysts wrote in a report titled “Prepping for perps: perpetual futures and more ‘gamification.’”
The question for prediction-market firms is whether major sporting events can do for event contracts what perpetual futures did for crypto: transform occasional speculation into a habit.