WHO'S REALLY
PLAYING?

For decades, betting on sports in North America meant a sportsbook. The book sets a price, takes your bet and builds its profit into the odds. Then a financial exchange called Kalshi convinced U.S. regulators that a contract paying $1 if a team wins is a derivative, not a wager. In 2026, that argument turned into the biggest story in sports betting.

How big it got

Kalshi is overseen by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which treats what it lists as event contracts.⁹ Sports are now most of the business. SGI Europe, querying Kalshi's public data through Dune Analytics, found that the week ending June 15, with the NBA Finals and the World Cup group stage, was the largest in the exchange's history: US$8.99 billion in volume, 86.9% of it sports.¹ Across Kalshi's lifetime to that date, sports made up roughly 85% of about US$112 billion traded.¹

The World Cup turned it mainstream. Kalshi says it added three million users during the tournament, with more than US$1.2 billion traded on the winner market alone.¹⁰ By late June, InGame reported, Kalshi had earned US$1.15 billion in fee revenue since launch, US$850 million of it in 2026.¹¹

How the money works

This is where prediction markets and sportsbooks really differ.

A sportsbook's standard line is -110 on both sides: you risk $110 to win $100. Each side implies a 52.4% chance of winning, so the two add up to 104.8%. That extra 4.8% is the book's built-in edge. (That's our arithmetic, and books vary their lines; real-world margins on parlays and props are much higher.)

On an exchange, your counterparty is another trader. Kalshi charges takers a fee using a published formula: 0.07 times the number of contracts times the price times one minus the price, rounded up.^2,12 The fee is largest on a coin-flip contract: 1.75 cents on a 50-cent contract, or about 3.5% of what you put in.^2,13 It shrinks toward the extremes. Makers, people who post orders that wait in the book, pay nothing on most markets, and there's no fee when a contract settles.¹²

The catch is the spread. On a thin market, the gap between buyers and sellers can cost you more than the fee. It's a trading cost, not a vig, but it's still a cost.¹³

The fights

U.S. states see a sportsbook with a different licence. More than a dozen state regulators have taken action against Kalshi and Polymarket, arguing sports contracts are unlicensed gambling.¹⁴ New Jersey has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how far federal law overrides the states.¹⁵ The NFL has asked exchanges to remove contracts it considers vulnerable to manipulation.¹⁵

What Canadians get

Here's the twist for readers in Toronto: almost none of this is available to you. Kalshi, Polymarket and Opinion all restrict Canadians or Ontario residents from using their platforms directly, The Logic reported.⁴ Polymarket settled with the Ontario Securities Commission in 2025 and was barred from the province for two years.¹⁶

In June, Toronto's Wealthsimple announced Wealthsimple Predict, a partnership giving Canadians access to nearly 4,000 Kalshi contracts.^4,17 Not sports, though. Canadian Gaming Business reported the offering covers areas like the economy, financial markets and climate.⁵ Before that, Interactive Brokers' ForecastEx was the only legal prediction exchange in Canada.¹⁷

Ontarians already have a regulated sports betting market. In June, with the World Cup partly in Toronto, iGaming Ontario reported $1.033 billion wagered on sports and related bets, 11% of all online wagering in the province.¹⁸ In January, sportsbooks took $86.7 million in revenue on $1.18 billion in handle.¹⁹ Our maths: that's a hold of about 7.3%.

Canadians aren't sold on the alternative. An Angus Reid Institute poll in May found 41% think prediction markets shouldn't be allowed here and 26% support them.³ Only 4% have ever placed a bet on one.³ Most of those who have also bet on sports.³

On September 25, The Athletic reported that an independent commission had found Manchester City guilty of 114 of the Premier League's 115 charges.⁶ The case dates to February 2023, when the league referred the club over alleged breaches of its financial rules covering the 2009-10 to 2022-23 seasons.^21,22 The hearing ran from September to December 2024.²³ The verdict took almost two more years.

What we know, and don't

The Premier League hasn't published the ruling. City neither confirmed nor denied the report,²⁴ and the club has always denied wrongdoing. No sanction has been set. Both sides have 14 days to appeal, and an appeal would go to a new three-person commission.⁶ City have since contested the verdict, and the chair of English football's independent regulator said in mid-October that the appeal is expected to be heard by January.²⁵ Previous titles have not been stripped.²⁶

The charges centred on whether City inflated sponsorship revenue and under-reported pay, including image-rights payments,²⁷ and on the club's cooperation with the investigation.²⁶ City is owned by the Abu Dhabi United Group. The fight was always about more than accounting: whether a club backed by a state-linked fortune could spend beyond what its football business earns.

Newcastle's model

Newcastle United is the cleaner example of state money in football, because the owner says so on paper. In October 2021, a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund bought the club from Mike Ashley for £305 million.²⁰ PIF took 80%. The Premier League said it received "legally binding assurances" that the Saudi state would not control the club.²⁸ PIF's governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, became chairman.²⁸

The money has gone where you'd expect: players, and a renovated training ground. Italy's Calcio e Finanza reported that Newcastle's revenue has grown from £140 million to more than £400 million since the takeover, and that PIF now holds 85%.²⁹

Why the rules keep losing

The league's tools for limiting spending have been tested in court. In 2024, a tribunal found that the Premier League's rules on associated-party transactions, deals between a club and companies linked to its owners, were partly anti-competitive, a ruling both sides claimed as a win.²⁷ Every rule designed to stop an owner from pumping money in through a friendly sponsor has a lawyer waiting for it.

Who pays

When the richest owners don't need a club to make money, the cost of competing goes up for everyone else. Mid-table clubs pay more in wages and fees to keep players, and fans tend to pay through ticket prices. We can't put a precise number on that knock-on effect, and anyone who does should show their working. But the direction isn't in dispute.

The Canadian mirror

There's a version of this story in our other mailers this month. On October 29, Ottawa committed up to $1.6 billion in equity to Cohere, the Toronto-founded AI company.³⁰ The 808 Brief covers it as sovereign AI. Different industry, same logic: a government using its balance sheet to buy influence in something it thinks matters. The difference is that Ottawa announced the deal, with conditions, in public.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, is a brain disease linked to repeated head impacts. It can only be confirmed after death, by examining brain tissue. That's why estimates have always been hard to pin down. In August, a study in The BMJ took the most rigorous run at it so far.

What the researchers did

The team, led by Dr. Daniel Daneshvar of Harvard Medical School with researchers from Boston University's CTE Center, identified every former NFL player who had played at least one game after 1949, the first year hard plastic helmets were mandatory, and who died between 2008 and 2021. There were 1,712 of them.^7,8

Of those, 338 donated their brains for study. And 315 of those 338, 93.2%, had CTE.³¹

The floor and the ceiling

You can't say 93% of NFL players get CTE. People who donate their brains are more likely to have had symptoms, so donors aren't a random sample. The study handles that honestly by giving a range.

The floor assumes nobody who didn't donate had CTE. On that assumption, at least 18.5% of all 1,712 players had the disease. The ceiling assumes every non-donor did: 98.7%.^31,32 The truth is somewhere in between.

For deaths between 2016 and 2021, when donation was most common, the range tightens. Of 878 players who died, 235 were examined and 215 had CTE.⁸ That puts the minimum at 24.5%.^8,32 That's where the headline comes from: at least one in four.

For comparison, community brain bank studies have found CTE in less than 1% of the general population, Daneshvar told WGBH.³²

The dementia link

Among donors, 104 had stage IV CTE, the most advanced.⁷ Nearly 60% of donors had dementia diagnosed by study clinicians, and stage IV disease was associated with a 44% higher prevalence of dementia. The average age at death was 66.5.⁷

Correcting a number you might see elsewhere: this is not "nearly 75% of NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023." The study covered 2008 to 2021, and its confirmed minimum is 18.5% over the whole period, 24.5% for 2016 to 2021.

What it can't tell you

The study is retrospective and observational, so the authors warn against reading it as proof of cause.⁷ It doesn't say how many living players have CTE. It looked at men who played in an earlier era, before many of today's rule changes. And some information about symptoms came from family members, who may remember imperfectly.³¹

The money question

The NFL's concussion settlement had a cutoff for new "Death with CTE" awards, tied to its 2015 final approval. The new study doesn't change that deadline, Law Commentary noted.³³ The league said it continues working to make the game safer. The players' association called the findings a sobering reminder that football carries real risks.³⁴

Why it matters here

The study is about American football. But the questions it raises, about repeated hits, youth leagues and who carries the long-term cost, apply to hockey and every contact sport Canadian kids play. Lead author Daneshvar called the findings a wake-up call.³⁴