The NFL regular season is about to start in early September, but all eyes are on Super Bowl LX, the end of the journey. It will kick off on February 8, 2026, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the San Francisco 49ers play their home games. And that’s pretty much all we know about it, for now. Who’s going to play at the halftime show? (Taylor Swift?) What epic TV commercials will be aired (and how much will 30 seconds of airtime cost?) are all unknown.

Another Super Bowl question that has sparked debate as the NFL season is about to kick off is how millions of US fans who want a piece of the action will back their favorite to win. Will they do it through sports betting, which is now legal in most US states, or will they buy event contracts, a new product that is exploding on the internet nowadays, with regulation and legality causing heated debates in courts across the country?

The partnership US betting powerhouse FanDuel announced with event-contract giant CME shows how the industry is trying to navigate an entirely different regulatory universe. The Super Bowl, being one of the largest betting events on the planet, will also determine how these two universes will collide or coexist.

Although many people think sports betting and events contracts are similar, they are two very different beasts.

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A traditional sports bet is speculative and meant for entertainment, based on a zero-sum wager between the sportsbook and bettor. Although some bettors apply knowledge and strategy, it is considered gambling, with results being purely up to chance. At the same time, event contracts companies argue that their product has a legitimate hedging function that, although it bears risk, is considered investment risk undertaken for economic purposes.

When placing a bet with a sportsbook, the bettor’s relationship and risk are solely with the sportsbook, which manages the risks, sets up the betting lines, adjusts the odds, and pays out large wins or collects losses. Event contracts are traded between members of a community, facilitated by a centralized exchange platform that doesn’t take part in the trade but rather facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers. Whereas a bookmaker determines odds in traditional betting, event contracts on an exchange platform are priced by market demand.

A bet will typically be binary and held until it expires (or cashed out early). For example, you can bet on the Pittsburgh Steelers to win against the New York Jets in the first gameday of these two teams this season. You will then win or lose based on the odds that were offered when you locked the bet. Event contracts are tradable, and their pricing will fluctuate depending on market conditions. For example, you can buy a contract for “Joe Burrow to win season MVP” and sell it months later at a profit if his odds improve, or alternatively, offload it at a loss if Burrow gets injured and his odds diminish.

Another huge difference is how event contracts are regulated compared to traditional NFL betting. Since the US Supreme Court annulled PASPA (the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992), each US state can regulate its own sports betting market. The regulators’ primary focus is to ensure operator integrity, protect customers from fraud, and put in place mechanisms to prevent and treat problem gambling.

Event contracts are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a federal agency that is more focused on ensuring market integrity, preventing market manipulation, and protecting investors from a seismic market shift. It is rarely concerned with protecting individual investors from addiction and the prevention of loss from excessive trading.

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The introduction of event contracts isn’t an evolution of sports betting. It is a big bang, representing the creation of an entirely new marketplace that operates under a different legal framework and a different set of values. Traditional betting lives in the sphere of entertainment and individual player protection, whereas event contracts exist in the world of investment and financial-market transparency and integrity.

The outcome of this regulatory debate will determine whether betting on the NFL and other major league sports will stay within the sportsbook space or expand into financial trading markets.

Pro Football Focus (PFF), the industry leader in football analytics, launched the first release of a new suite of betting products powered by PFF AI: the Player Prop Tool. Available now in the PFF app, the tool is designed to help sports bettors make smarter, sharper player prop picks – using the same proprietary data, player grades, matchup insights, and predictive modeling that NFL front offices rely on.

News Highlights

• Smarter Betting, Backed by Data: Go beyond trends or gut instinct with insights grounded in proprietary PFF player grades and predictive models.

• All-in-One Betting Hub: Stop bouncing between odds feeds, blogs and sportsbooks. Access player grades, matchup analysis and AI-powered betting insights with just a few taps – everything you need, in one place.

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• Find Your Edge: Identify prime betting spots with PFF Edge, a proprietary metric that surfaces key mismatches and market inefficiencies.

• Odds That Work for You: Instantly compare lines across major sportsbooks and identify the best edge – in real time.

• League Trusted Data Source: The only tool built on the same PFF data, player grades, and matchup analysis trusted by all 32 NFL teams.

• Available Now: In the PFF app (iOS and Android) for PFF+ subscribers.

“This tool is designed to empower, not prescribe – we’re giving everyday bettors access to the same caliber of data and insights used inside NFL war rooms. We’ve democratized the most trusted data intelligence in football and built a product that empowers fans to think like the pros and bet with confidence,” said Raj Kapoor, PFF Principal Product Manager, Sports Betting.

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Most prop betting tools offer fragmented stats and outdated odds. PFF’s Player Prop Tool unifies it all – insights, matchups, projections, and real-time lines – surfacing the most bettable props each week in a central hub. Users can explore hundreds of props at once, filtering by position, game, player matchup rating, or price, and jump straight to the sportsbook with a single tap.

PFF’s Player Prop Tool Includes:

• Projection and cover probability

• Matchup advantage based on PFF’s proprietary data

• Historical hit rates and recent trends

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• PFF Key Insights: AI-generated breakdowns explaining the “why” behind every pick

• Real-time odds across major sportsbooks (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, and Fanatics)

• Streamlined bet placement with direct sportsbook links.

NFL bettors wagered $35B last season – a 30% spike over the previous year. Yet most still rely on hunches, highlight reels, or fragmented odds feeds. With 64% of bettors favoring props over moneylines or spreads, the need for structured, smarter tools is exploding.

PFF is bridging this gap with its new suite of betting products, starting with the Player Prop Tool – bringing organized, trusted analysis to bettors fingertips, no matter their experience level. With this launch, PFF is turning decades of data and elite football expertise into a new standard for consumer betting.

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Brendan O’Kane, CEO at OtherLevels, reveals how transforming data into more relevant and sophisticated communications is hugely successful at activating and engaging customers.

Fewer than 100 days out from the start of the new NFL season, sportsbooks will be planning  their marketing strategies to maximize the engagement opportunities that the season brings.

A month after the Philadelphia Eagles go up against the Dallas Cowboys, the NBA season also gets underway. Both landmark dates will long since have been picked out by sportsbook marketing teams as hooks to reactivate existing customers.

However, OtherLevels recent research shows that a reliance on mass seasonal campaigns not only risks missing the target in terms of engagement and activation, but can actively alienate customers. Modern, digital-first customers are smart and savvy – and they see through and ignore generic communications.

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Our findings showed that seasonal campaigning, driven by high-profile sports, is over-prioritised with individual customer behaviors and preferences heavily under-utilized. The study also highlighted a common gap where raw behavioral data – which all operators have access to – is not transformed into sophisticated content and media.

Activation and Engagement

To determine how effectively one of the leading US-based sportsbooks was creating relevant  communications for its customers, we conducted a two-month study of mobile engagement using the app push channel. The premise behind the research was that personalized, relevant and contextual communications lift activation and engagement in sports betting.

Our research team tracked two consistent customers who placed a total of 228 similar wagers on NFL, NBA, NHL, and EPL events. Both customers consistently bet on the same teams and props with consistent cash values.

Our expectation was that the sportsbook would leverage the repeated, predictable behaviour to tailor personalized communications.

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The results, however, showed a significant lack of personalization. Despite both of our users exclusively betting on professional football, basketball, soccer and hockey, 29% of communications failed to mention any of these sports.

A total of 23% of messages promoted college football or basketball, which neither customer had ever wagered on. Soccer, which accounted for 19% of total bets placed, featured in only 1% of communications.

A mere 7% of communications contained token personalization – most of which was attribute-based (customer name or location), with 93% completely lacking behavioral personalization. Crucially, the operator failed to use betting behavior to tailor content related to preferred teams, props, markets, or odds changes.

The research showed that there is a significant disconnect between what we expected in terms of personalized communications and what was delivered. It uncovers a prevalent challenge within the industry: the disparity between the availability of customer data and how to transform this into compelling content and media, suitable for use by a (generic) CRM platform.

To create campaigns that are more effective, customer data needs to be transformed into content and activation needs to be automated. This is not trivial – a personalization engine does not create content, it outputs a JSON data recommendation. Automation is equally challenging. Take the NBA as an example: given that there are over 1,300 games, without an automated content and media creation capability built for 24/7 sports, there is a fundamental gap between personalization recommendations and an exciting, in the moment, customer experience. A marketing team relying on a generic CRM platform, lacks the automated content capabilities to create sophisticated sports content and CTAs.

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Customer-centric

At OtherLevels, our Experience Platform fills that gap. It combines operator or 3^rd party personalized recommendations, live odds, historical betting behaviour, and match context to create 100% automated, hyper-personalized CTA communications, for delivery by existing marTech platforms.

The positive results of this approach are clear to see. For two of the operators we work with, this customer-centric approach to marketing communications resulted in a 16% uplift in engagement across the NBA last season, an 8% lift from NFL for outbound communications and a 30% increase in on-site interaction for sophisticated NFL content.

When sportsbooks gear up for major seasons like the NFL and NBA, a default reliance on traditional CRM platforms that cannot create compelling sport content at scale leads to suboptimal engagement and risks alienating customers.

Conversely, adopting a customer-centric approach that leverages betting behavior and an automated, cutting-edge content and media engine, creates automated, hyper-personalized communications. This approach has been shown to dramatically increase activation and engagement, highlighting a clear next step for more effective sportsbook marketing.

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