Asset Class: Mets Tap Novig

July 30, 2026

The Mets are the first Major League Baseball team to sign a deal with a prediction-market platform—and it isn’t Kalshi or Polymarket. The New York team went with Novig.

—Ben Horney

First Up

The NFL, NBA, and others say there’s more to be done on the CFTC’s prediction-market rule proposal to protect against integrity issues and market manipulation.
A Netflix documentary trailer sparked controversy after showing a Kalshi World Cup trade in Nevada, where it can’t offer sports markets. Kalshi says the bet slip was “fabricated.”
Zuffa Boxing, launched with the goal of creating an organized boxing league similar to UFC, has had to balance its long-term goals with recent demands from star fighters.
FIFA’s plan to create a commercial arm for part of the business and bring on private investors raises concerns about influence and lacks transparency, experts say.

Meet the Mets’ Prediction-Market Pick: Novig

John Jones-Imagn Images

The Mets are the first Major League Baseball team to sign a deal with a prediction-market platform, and they didn’t pick Kalshi or Polymarket. They chose Novig.

Terms of the exclusive, multiyear agreement were not disclosed. Under the deal, which will begin this season, Novig will be featured on the outfield wall at Citi Field and have a prominent presence throughout the ballpark and on Mets broadcasts, including through digital signage, LED displays, and more. Novig is now also an “MLB authorized prediction market,” meaning it’s allowed to use official league data under the “integrity framework” established through an agreement between MLB and the CFTC.

“It’s a big milestone, but not just for us,” Novig founder Jacob Fortinsky tells Front Office Sports. “It’s a sign of what’s to come. Major sports organizations are embracing prediction markets.”

Fortinsky says the seeds of the partnership were planted when he met Josh Cohen, the son of Mets owner Steve Cohen, at a recent UFC match in New York City.

“I told him about the business, he was excited about it, and the conversation went from there,” Fortinsky tells FOS.

The 28-year-old, whose company has raised more than $100 million since its 2021 formation, is a lifelong Mets fan who has endured the ups and downs that come with rooting for the franchise—this season the Mets sit in last place in their division. The last time the Mets won the World Series, in 1986, Fortinsky had not yet been born.

“But there’s no more passionate fan base, and I think there’s no better team in terms of what they represent to the city,” Fortinsky says.

He sees parallels between Novig and the Mets. When people think about prediction markets, the two names that come up first are Kalshi and Polymarket, not Novig.

“There’s an underdog mentality with the Mets, being in the same city with the Yankees,” he says. “In some sense, we’re the underdog coming into the prediction-market space.”

The partnership was reached a little over four months after MLB broke the seal on prediction markets through an exclusive agreement with Polymarket. The Mets held talks with multiple companies and ultimately determined Novig’s focus on sports, technology, and responsible trading aligned with the organization’s approach to emerging categories, according to the team’s SVP of corporate partnerships Zach Feldman.

“There was immediate connectivity with the Novig team,” Feldman tells FOS. “We loved the fact that they were New York–based, loved their differentiation of being a sports-first company built for sports fans, and shared their mindset of being fan-first and focused on innovation.”

Novig, which recently received federal approval enabling it to expand into all 50 states, previously had a short-term partnership with LIV Golf during this year’s Masters Tournament. Fortinsky has acknowledged that competitors like Kalshi and Polymarket have a first-mover advantage, but he says his platform is playing the long game.

Novig focuses only on sports, unlike Kalshi, Polymarket, and other prediction-market platforms that allow users to bet on everything from whether it’ll rain in New York City on a given day to when the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. Fortinsky points to the fact that Novig has a 21-year-old age requirement for users—something pro leagues like the NFL and NBA have explicitly asked the Trump Administration to implement—as one of the reasons the company is well positioned to outlast competitors.

The Mets are the first MLB franchise to reach a prediction-market deal, but not the first pro sports franchise to get into the prediction-market game. The NHL became the first major pro league to partner with prediction markets in October by making deals with Kalshi and Polymarket. The Blackhawks then reached a separate deal with Kalshi, followed by the Rangers striking an agreement with Polymarket.

Deal Flow

Heading to Vegas

Jul 28, 2026; West Sacramento, California, USA; Athletics outfielder Lawrence Butler (4) gestures after hitting a RBI double against the Boston Red Sox during the eighth inning at Sutter Health Park.

Dennis Lee-Imagn Images

Former MLB pro Chan Ho Park is leading a consortium that will plug $70 million into the Athletics, according to a statement shared with Front Office Sports. Park will serve as an adviser to majority owner John Fisher, and his investment group also includes actors Ken Jeong and Daniel Dae Kim. The news comes about a week after Mark Cuban and Rashaun Williams’s private-equity fund took a stake in the A’s, who currently play in Sacramento but are set to begin playing in Las Vegas in 2028.
Fanatics is bringing its prediction-market infrastructure in-house through the acquisition of Water Street Labs, a CFTC-registered designated contract market, and CX Clearinghouse, a CFTC-registered derivatives clearing organization. The seller is brokerage and financial technology company BGC Group. Previously, Fanatics offered event contracts through a partnership with Crypto.com.
Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions is merging with Professional Fighters League to create a single combat sports entity offering boxing, mixed martial arts, and more. The combined business will be led by Paul and his fellow MVP cofounder Nakisa Bidarian, and PFL’s founding investors, 885 Capital and Knighthead Capital Management, will remain invested and commit additional capital.
Parlay Capital and Data Point Capital are leading a $35 million investment in ProphetX, a prediction-market platform that offers only sports-event contracts. The company received CFTC approval in June and says it expects to triple trading volume this year as it puts the new funding to use.

Notes From Wall Street

Adidas Disappoints Investors

Jul 15, 2026; New York, NY, USA; An Adidas advertisement featuring Lionel Messi for the FIFA World Cup 2026 at Times Square.

Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Shares of Adidas were in free fall Thursday morning—dropping by as much as 16%—after the German sportswear company reported second-quarter earnings. Sales were up 13%, slightly above expectations, but operating margin missed expectations by a lot. The culprit was significantly higher marketing costs around the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup. Marketing expenses were up 30% year over year to more than $1 billion (€924 million). “In absolute terms [the second quarter] was a good quarter, but against a rising tide of World Cup expectations this is going to disappoint investors,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note.
Bernstein analysts say brand partnerships for TKO, which owns WWE and UFC, “are under-monetized,” with the potential to reach at least $1.4 billion by 2030, above management’s target and consensus estimates. Sponsorship for the fiscal year 2025 grew 25% year over year at UFC and more than 92% year over year at WWE “as the Paramount and Netflix halos began flowing through the partnership stack, and consensus has not caught up.” (UFC streams on Paramount+, while WWE’s Monday Night Raw began streaming on Netflix in January 2025.)
Bernstein estimates WWE sponsorship will more than double from 6% of revenue in fiscal year 2024 to 13% by 2027, while UFC sponsorship dollars nearly double over the same period “on a larger revenue base and rising mix.” UFC numbered events command some of the highest ratings in 2026, as distribution through Paramount is about four times higher than UFC’s prior ESPN reach in one quarter, according to Bernstein. Zuffa Boxing—a joint venture between TKO and Saudi-backed entertainment conglomerate Sela—is expected to “generate hundreds of millions in annual economic value by 2030.”
Weighing in on Nike’s move to remove its products from a host of online distributors in China beginning in January, Bernstein analysts say it amounts to a “large sales headwind” and “margin tailwind.” The goal of the reset is to improve brand equity and to “concentrate online traffic into fewer, higher-quality touchpoints.” It will result in a low-teens decline in Nike’s China sales and a small drop in the company’s total growth in fiscal year 2027, which should be offset by stronger margins later. Which of Nike’s competitors will benefit the most from the shift? Adidas, the analysts say—“both from online customers shifting their market share, and from higher demand from partners like Topsports and Pou Sheng,” which have been Nike’s biggest retail partners. Domestic brands like Anta and Li Ning will also benefit.