Issue 8

Opening Take

MLB just agreed to give its official game data to FutureSports, a Chicago-based startup that turns team performance into financial indexes. Each of the 30 clubs gets its own index, which opens the season at 7,500 points and moves in real time based on 70 statistical factors, from runs scored to strikeouts. CME Group plans to list futures contracts on those indexes, and fund companies have already filed with the SEC for ETFs built on top of them.

Earlier this month, we looked at a firm using $3M in Kalshi trades to hedge Lane Kiffin's performance bonus. That was one clever trade. This is the infrastructure to make it routine. FutureSports is pitching it as a hedging tool for broadcasters, sponsors, and local businesses whose revenue rises and falls with a team's record.

Leagues have spent years licensing their data to sportsbooks and media partners. Now, that same data is becoming a benchmark for capital markets. When a team's performance has a ticker, who else starts paying attention to how that team is run?

What I'm Watching

• The Marlins' scouting cuts weren't about money. Last month, the Miami Marlins cut half of their pro scouting staff, and the easy assumption was a low-payroll team was trimming costs. The Miami Herald now reports that the team kept 6 of its 12 scouts and made the cuts because it believes pro scouting is generally better done through TrackMan video and data analytics than in person. The technology uses Doppler radar and high-speed cameras. The Braves, Nationals, Astros and Twins have already gone the same way. It's a front office deciding the model is better than the expert, and admitting it openly instead of calling it cost-cutting. Read more​
• DraftKings built one model and shelved the other. A New York Times investigation found that a DraftKings machine-learning model built in 2023 scored customers by how much they were expected to lose after getting a free bet or bonus. A former employee said an internal model for predicting when a user was heading toward a crisis was showing promise, but the project was shelved in early 2025. DraftKings says it rejects any implication that its marketing unfairly targets customers. Read more​
• Puntr wants to give every fan a persistent identity. Puntr, a Wilmington, Delaware sports tech company, raised $500K in a round led by Accretion Capital. It's building a personal interface for global sports meant to create a persistent fan identity across every interaction. Read more​

Insight of the Week

$6 billion. That's how much Kalshi traded over the weekend of September 19-20, according to GamingAmerica. It was the platform's second record weekend in a row, just seven days after it did about $4.9 billion on the NFL's opening weekend.

The more interesting number is 64%. That's the share of Saturday's volume that came from parlay-style combo contracts, while straight sports contracts made up only 26%. Volume also counts both sides of every trade, so it isn't the same thing as a sportsbook's handle.

Prediction markets pitch themselves as price discovery, where the crowd knows something the experts don't. But most of this activity looks a lot like the long-shot parlays sportsbooks built their businesses on. As leagues sign data deals and exchanges roll out team performance futures, are we watching a new market take shape, or a familiar one under a new name?

Looking Ahead

• ​SPORTEL Monaco, Monaco (Oct 19-21)
• ​Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference (CMSAC), Pittsburgh, PA (Oct 23-24)
• ​Sport Marketing Association (SMA) 23rd Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD (Oct 28-30; early rates end Oct 1)

If you're attending any of these, reply and let me know. I'd love to connect.

Odell