The 2026 FIFA World Cup opens Thursday across North American stadiums, and while fans are focused on the beautiful game, Wall Street is fixated on a different kind of score: the billions of dollars expected to flow through sportsbooks and prediction markets over the next month.
With 104 matches scheduled across the expanded 48-team format—roughly 60% more bettable inventory than previous tournaments—analysts at investment firm Bernstein are projecting more than $3 billion in incremental handle and as much as $10 billion in broader consumer volume uplift across sports betting and prediction platforms.
It’s a staggering figure for what is traditionally the slowest stretch of the online sports betting calendar. Bernstein called the World Cup a “potential watershed moment” for prediction markets and online sports betting platforms, saying that it could accelerate recent prediction market momentum from giants like Kalshi and Polymarket to fuel growth in the years ahead.
“Predictions are already inflecting ahead of the first whistle: DraftKings disclosed this week that May annualized consumer volume rose 24% month-over-month to $1.3 billion and total volume traded rose 34% to $3.1 billion, extending a steep three-month ramp,” Bernstein analysts wrote.
“We have long argued that prediction markets represent a new sports engagement monetization layer rather than an existential threat to the books (TikTok, not Napster),” they added. “Kalshi and Polymarket have scaled quickly, predominantly in California, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, but we believe the World Cup creates an opportunity for the rest of the field to accelerate customer acquisition into what is likely to be a trillion-dollar volume market by 2030.”
Robinhood is using the event to commercially launch Rothera, its own CFTC-licensed prediction markets exchange, while Coinbase—which said it crossed $100 million in annualized prediction markets revenue within two months of launching the product in early 2026—is offering World Cup contracts through its Kalshi partnership.
