In what surprisingly is not an April Fools’ joke, the NFL is currently without an official sports betting partner.
According to Sports Business Journal, the NFL’s content deals with official partners DraftKings, FanDuel, and Caesars all expired on April 1 without new contracts in place. It effectively leaves the biggest, most powerful, and most successful sports league in America a free agent in the marketplace.
The original deals were struck in 2021 for a five-year term, with a combined value of about $1 billion. The NFL could have exited the deals early, but chose to stick with it through the full length of the contract. It marked a transformational moment in the sports world, as decades of pushback against gambling gave way to the NFL becoming a bedfellow of betting.
As is not a shock, the dispute comes down to money. Much like the upcoming television rights renewals, in which the NFL is looking to greatly increase its revenue, the prices for sportsbooks to become official league partners are also going up.
At the center of the dispute is the charge for the books, based on official streaming data from Genius, the league’s official data distributor. Without access to the data, a deal with the NFL can’t happen.
Caesars is reportedly not pursuing a renewal with the NFL, but DraftKings and FanDuel are still in negotiations.
Given that DraftKings and FanDuel effectively have a duopoly in the sports betting space (RIP ESPN Bet), it’s hard to imagine they won’t eventually make a deal with the NFL. Unlike the wild west of prediction markets, which the league has opposed, regulation and partnership have been effective for both sides. Sportsbooks can offer their products on official NFL platforms while gaining access to league marks, logos, data, and intelligence. In exchange, the NFL gets a ton of money in a new revenue stream. It seems like it should only be a matter of time before a new agreement is drawn up, given the size of DraftKings and FanDuel and the importance of the NFL to their business. In fact, it would be a major shock if a new deal isn’t struck before the new football season at the very latest.
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