Author: Zen, PANews

Over the past few years, prediction market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi have turned political, macroeconomic, crypto, entertainment, and sports events into tradable markets, allowing users to express probabilistic judgments and earn profits by buying and selling event outcomes. Especially after entering the sports sector, these platforms have experienced significant and sustained growth in trading volume, making it a pillar of their revenue structure.

This year, a big year for sports, especially with the 2026 World Cup co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico and expanding to 48 teams for the first time, will be the biggest public stress test the sports prediction market has ever faced. It compresses sports competition, cross-border event organization, the betting ecosystem, and global user traffic into a single market scenario, significantly amplifying both the risk dimensions and external attention.

In such a high-density, globalized, and cross-jurisdictional sporting event, once insiders combine with tradable prediction markets, any information gap regarding injuries, starting lineups, referees, or even internal governance can be quickly transformed into a price advantage.

In this sense, the 2026 World Cup is not only an opportunity for the prediction market to compete for sports traffic, but also a public test of its ability to uphold sports integrity.

From obscurity to the forefront of the World Cup, FIFA's prediction market partner faces multiple criticisms.

In April of this year, FIFA announced its official prediction market partner for the 2026 World Cup. Surprisingly, the brand announced this time was neither Polymarket nor Kalshi, but a little-known platform – ADI Predictstreet.

Just as people were wondering who ADI Predictstreet was, this company, which was placed at the center of the world's largest sporting event, began to be questioned due to the negative history of its senior executives, the speed of license issuance, and the immaturity of its products.

The first controversy surrounding PredictStreet is the issue of executive integrity. When ADI PredictStreet was announced as FIFA's betting partner, Ajay Bhatia, a member of the company's chief board, appeared on stage on behalf of the company. He posed for a photo with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and the two held up a jersey with the ADI PredictStreet logo on the back.

Bhatia is the CEO and General Manager of QuantLase Lab, a subsidiary of IHC (International Holding Company), headed by a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and the Vice President of the UAE. Meanwhile, ADI Predictstreet is part of Finstreet, which in turn is a subsidiary of Sirius International Holding, which is also under IHC.

According to Norwegian football news outlet Josimar, Bhatia was embroiled in an insider trading scandal in 2025. He was accused of purchasing Adani Group shares before IHC publicly announced its investment in Indian energy giant Adani Group. The case was settled in September 2025 for approximately $150,000, and Bhatia pleaded not guilty.

Just after Josimar revealed Bhatia's past, ADI Predictstreet announced that Dimitrios Psarrakis would become CEO. However, Psarrakis's resume also appears to be questionable. He previously served as an assistant to Eva Kaili , the former Vice-President of the European Parliament, who was a key figure in the European Parliament's Qatar corruption scandal (also known as Qatargate).

Kaili accepted bribes from Qatar and Morocco in exchange for securing benefits for those two countries within the EU. While Kaili's legal and ethical risks cannot be directly equated with Psarrakis's, his professional connection to the central figure in the scandal is enough to raise questions about his reputation and due diligence.

Besides the issues surrounding the credibility of its executives, the speed at which ADI Predictstreet, touted as the first officially approved European prediction market, obtained its license is equally noteworthy. Just days before being announced as the official prediction market partner for the 2026 World Cup, ADI Predictstreet announced it had received its license in Gibraltar. The official statement described the approval process as "record-breaking" and extremely rigorous.

However, although ADI Predictstreet's website domain was registered in January of this year and obtained its license at the end of March, its official products have not yet been launched, and the experience of real-money trading remains unknown. As the official prediction market platform promoted by FIFA to the forefront of the World Cup, it is still impossible for outsiders to determine whether its actual transaction matching, settlement, risk control, anti-manipulation, and user protection mechanisms have undergone stress testing.

Therefore, given the multiple uncertainties, the partnership between the World Cup and ADI Predictstreet was fraught with a trust deficit from the very beginning.

FIFA's historical baggage and controversy over betting

Besides the questionable credibility of the ADI Predictstreet platform, FIFA, which is also criticized for corruption, will find it difficult to gain "inherent trust" in this matter.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice filed massive corruption charges against numerous FIFA officials and sports marketing executives. Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch described the corruption as "widespread, systematic, and deeply entrenched." This historical context makes it difficult for FIFA to convince the public with official statements alone in any collaborations involving betting, data, or prediction markets.

In recent years, FIFA's ties with the betting and data industries have deepened, leading to a similar increase in concerns about the integrity of the sport.

Shortly before the 2022 Qatar World Cup, FIFA reached an agreement with betting operator Betano; the following year, FIFA signed an agreement with New Zealand lottery company TAB for the Women's World Cup; in early 2026, FIFA brought more lower-level matches to the betting market by reaching an agreement with data company Stats Perform to commercialize its streaming platform FIFA+.

From a business perspective, this can be interpreted as FIFA's development of data assets and fan interaction. However, from the perspective of sports integrity, it also means that the World Cup is being more deeply embedded in the betting and trading ecosystem. As the event becomes increasingly enamored with the commercial value brought by the betting and trading ecosystem, whether it can still independently control risks becomes a big question mark.

In response, FIFA has taken several measures to address gambling-related threats. In 2024, FIFA moved its legal department and integrity team to Miami (resulting in the loss of many experienced staff), and also established an integrity task force whose members include Interpol, the FBI, and representatives from the gambling industry.

In February 2026, FIFA announced that IC360, a US-based integrity and compliance monitoring company, would join the working group and use its ProhiBet software to monitor betting-related threats, including whether players and match officials were betting on their own matches.

However, this mechanism is more like a screening tool for the formal market than a complete defense against the risks of global betting and prediction markets surrounding the World Cup. For an event with participants all over the world and an extremely long information chain, the truly dangerous insider trading often does not occur in the places most easily seen by regulators.

Concerns about insider trading are rising, and market leaders are predicting stricter regulations.

Traditional betting monitoring typically relies on information sharing among betting companies, data providers, leagues, and regulatory bodies. Prediction markets, however, may involve crypto wallets, offshore platforms, cross-border accounts, proxy trading, and decentralized settlements. Even if official partner platforms are regulated, other platforms may still bypass the FIFA official system to operate in the World Cup market.

Whether FIFA's traditional integrity tools can penetrate such transactions when they occur between non-partner platforms, non-US users, crypto wallets, or proxy accounts is an unproven question.

In the sports prediction market, the risk of insider manipulation regarding the World Cup champion, group stage qualification, and a particular team's advancement is usually low, and it is difficult for a single participant to manipulate the predictions.

However, the more micro and small markets are completely different. Whether a player starts, whether a player is injured or substituted, whether a red card is issued in a match, whether a team is awarded a penalty, whether a referee officiates, and whether a VAR controversy occurs in a match are all more easily influenced by a few insiders and more easily priced in advance due to non-public information.

As the sole regulatory body for prediction markets, the U.S. Federation of Trade Unions (CFTC) recognized this early on. One of its key guidelines for sports prediction markets is to remind regulated exchanges to pay attention to individual player performance contracts, prop bets, and easily manipulated micro-markets. The CFTC also encourages platforms to share data with sports leagues and strengthen contract settlement and market monitoring.

In response, prediction market platforms in the US market have also taken measures to regulate this. Following Congress's push for legislation restricting prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket quickly updated their rules. Kalshi stated it would prohibit sports-related individuals from trading contracts related to their field of involvement or employment, while Polymarket also updated its rules to prohibit users from trading related contracts when they possess confidential information or can influence the outcome of events.

However, the World Cup is far more complex than any single professional league in the United States. The NBA and MLB have clearly defined leagues, teams, players' unions, referees, and official data systems. The World Cup, on the other hand, involves a vast network of entities, including FIFA, the six continental federations, 48 ​​national teams, clubs, agents, medical teams, referee committees, broadcasters, and data providers. Who are the "insiders," how are they identified, and can they transact through relatives, friends, proxy wallets, or third-party accounts? These questions are far more difficult to answer in the World Cup context.

Furthermore, prediction markets face not only issues of sports integrity but also global regulatory legitimacy. In April of this year, the Brazilian government blocked 27 prediction market platforms and tightened derivatives rules, prohibiting the use of sports, online games, politics, elections, culture, and social outcomes as underlying assets for derivatives. Dozens of other countries also do not accept the notion that "event contracts are not gambling."

Under such circumstances, FIFA's choice of a platform with numerous doubts and an unverified product as its official World Cup prediction market partner has once again brought the issue of sports integrity to the forefront.

Of course, the 2026 World Cup will not determine the survival of the prediction market, but it is likely to determine the boundaries of the prediction market's mainstreaming in the global sports industry: whether it will be a regulated event trading infrastructure or yet another betting risk gateway amplified by global sports traffic.