CME leadership calls sports event contracts gambling as FanDuel talks advance
CME Group chief executive Duffy told analysts on the company's second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, 22 July that he considers sports event contracts to be gambling and raised questions with the CFTC about novelty markets. The remarks came as the exchange expands its own sports event contracts and pursues a partnership with FanDuel Predicts to list contracts on Nadex alongside CME's exchange. Incoming CEO Fitzpatrick, who takes over next year, echoed the caution and said CME wants to be very careful about sports event contracts. Both leaders' positioning suggests any FanDuel deal would move slowly and face heavy internal scrutiny.
CME's gambling label from its own CEO undermines the regulatory case for sports event contracts while the exchange tries to profit from them. That contradiction gives ammunition to the bipartisan Senate bill that would ban sports event contracts on CFTC-regulated platforms, a bill Kalshi and Polymarket are already fighting. For FanDuel, CME's public hesitation means a partnership that looked like a fast on-ramp into regulated prediction markets now carries reputational risk from both sides.
Any deal that does close will need strict structural firewalls between CME's traditional derivatives business and the FanDuel-linked sports products. The timetable is compressing: Congress has live volume data and insider-trading headlines to cite, and a federal ban could arrive before CME and FanDuel finish negotiating terms.