When the ball is kicked off in Mexico City on Thursday, it starts a six-week, 48-team, 104-match tournament that finishes July 19 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon estimates global wagers could exceed $50 billion, up from more than $35 billion during the 2022 tournament in Qatar. The expanded field (40 more matches than 2022), favorable North American time zones, and far broader legal access in the US all point the same direction, and Macquarie expects the event to add roughly 2% to 5% to operator earnings in 2027.
The scale is worth pausing on, because the US share is only a slice of it. Soccer betting is a global business in a way American sports are not, and most of that $50 billion will be wagered outside the United States. Flutter CEO Peter Jackson put the audience gap plainly last week: "We think the Super Bowl is big here in America. You might have 200 million people watching it. Last time, when the World Cup Finals played in Qatar, 1.5 billion people watched the final. Five billion people watched the whole competition, so this is massive."
Why this World Cup is different for the US
The 2022 World Cup arrived when only about 40% of the US population could legally bet from home. By Thursday's kickoff, that figure is roughly 65%, according to the American Gaming Association. In less than four years the addressable US audience has expanded by more than half, and the product has improved alongside it: deeper same-game parlays, better live in-play betting, and soccer-specific markets that barely existed at the last men's tournament. That combination is why analysts think this World Cup could be more commercially valuable to US operators than any before it, even though soccer has historically been a small share of American handle.
Caesars is a useful illustration. The book says it is offering ten times more betting options than it did for the 2022 World Cup, folding in the kinds of markets that proved popular during March Madness. "If the US Men's National Team makes a deep run, that's when things could really accelerate, driving massive spikes in engagement and betting with each match," Caesars Digital senior vice president of sports Dominic Hammond told CNBC. He added the obvious caution for anyone betting it: "the tournament's unpredictability and the surge in parlay betting mean just a few key upsets can significantly swing outcomes."
The US handle: about $3.3 billion, and a two-horse race
Deutsche Bank estimates the tournament will generate roughly $3.3 billion in US betting handle (the total amount wagered), with both bull and bear cases around that number. The projected split is lopsided toward the two market leaders:
- FanDuel: about $1.3 billion
- DraftKings: about $1.1 billion
- BetMGM (co-owned by MGM and Entain): about $250 million
- Caesars: about $120 million
- theScore Bet (Penn): about $83 million
For perspective, DraftKings took roughly $54 billion in sports-betting handle over all of last year, so a billion-dollar World Cup is meaningful but not season-defining. The bigger prize is acquisition: a global event in the dead of the US sports calendar is a chance to sign up new bettors, which is exactly why the spending is about to get loud.
Who is positioned to win it
Macquarie pointed to FanDuel parent Flutter Entertainment as one of the best-placed operators, precisely because of its global footprint. Flutter can capture demand not only in North America, where the games are played, but in markets like Brazil, where the sport is closer to a religion than a pastime. The firm also flagged Super Group and Rush Street Interactive as well-positioned, along with the sports-data companies that quietly power the whole ecosystem, Genius Sports and Sportradar. Sportradar just signed a deal to supply the prediction platform Kalshi with data on soccer, baseball, hockey, and UFC, a sign of where the data business sees its next growth.
The prediction-market wild card
The genuinely new ingredient this cycle is the prediction market. For the first time at a World Cup, bettors across the entire country, including the large states with no legal sportsbook (California, Texas, Georgia, and effectively Florida), can take a position on matches through federally regulated event contracts. That is a structural change from 2022, and it is happening fast. Piper Sandler analyst Patrick Moley noted that Kalshi and Polymarket together saw trading volume grow 13% week over week to a record $7 billion. Kalshi, which dominates the space, is offering nearly 500 World Cup markets, with the most volume sitting on the July 19 final, where Spain and France currently lead the probabilities.
The established sportsbooks are hedging into the same territory. Fanatics, FanDuel, and DraftKings all now run prediction platforms, but they limit the sports markets to states where they do not hold gaming licenses, so as not to cannibalize their own books. DraftKings underlined the momentum on Tuesday, when its stock jumped 11% after it reported May prediction-market volume rising 34% month over month to $3.1 billion annualized, which we broke down in our piece on DraftKings Predictions topping $1 billion in annualized consumer volume. Fanatics, meanwhile, holds the only official FIFA prediction-market license, as we covered when it secured the rights co-branded with PredictStreet.
One caveat hangs over all of it. The legal status of sports event contracts is still contested: multiple states are in active proceedings, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission asserts it has exclusive jurisdiction to regulate them. The products are live and legal today, but the ground beneath the category is less settled than a state-licensed sportsbook. A survey from fraud-prevention firm SEON found licensed betting apps remain the most popular way to bet the World Cup at 29%, with prediction markets second at 19%, ahead of social casinos, crypto platforms, and offshore sites.
The responsible-gambling reality
An event this big has a cost that the handle estimates do not capture. The structure of the tournament, multiple matches a day for more than a month, is exactly the pattern that gambling-harm specialists worry about most. Matt Zarb-Cousin, a former gambling addict who co-founded the blocking service Gamban, framed it bluntly to CNBC: "Betting apps are optimized for engagement; they want to keep their users in action for as long as possible so their gambling becomes habitual. Fans will be bombarded with continuous advertising and inducements for frequent betting opportunities. For the gambling industry, the World Cup will be like March Madness on steroids."
The SEON survey gives that warning some teeth. Nearly a quarter of respondents admitted to what it called "friendly fraud," including opening multiple accounts to claim sign-up promotions, and millennials showed both the highest propensity to bet (65% said they were at least somewhat likely to wager) and the highest use of prediction markets, social casinos, crypto platforms, and multiple-account sign-ups. The same features that make this the biggest betting event ever (constant action, aggressive promotions, frictionless apps) are the ones that make a month-long tournament a real risk for anyone prone to betting more than they intend.
What it means for bettors
If you bet in a legal state, the practical upside is real: more markets, better same-game parlays, and live in-play options than any prior World Cup, plus heavy promotions as books fight for signups. The right approach is the same as always, only more so during a six-week firehose of matches. Shop lines across more than one book, because pricing on soccer markets varies widely; lean on our best sportsbooks for the World Cup ranking and futures and outright odds hub to start, and our guide to betting the World Cup if you are newer to soccer markets.
If you live in California, Texas, Georgia, or Florida, prediction markets are, for now, the only legal way to take a position on the tournament from home. They behave differently from a sportsbook (binary yes/no contracts rather than a full soccer menu), and the legal picture is still moving, so size positions accordingly. And wherever you are, the single most useful habit for a tournament this long is to decide your limits before kickoff, not in the middle of a Group F upset. Most apps let you set deposit and time limits; use them. If betting stops being fun, the national helpline is 1-800-GAMBLER.
Our take
The 2026 World Cup is the event the entire US industry has been building toward, and not just because of the handle. It lands at the exact moment the market has matured to roughly two-thirds legal access and prediction markets have opened the rest of the country, so for the first time a global tournament can reach nearly every American bettor through one channel or another. Expect an advertising blitz to match, and expect the two giants, FanDuel and DraftKings, to take the lion's share while the data companies sell picks and shovels to everyone.
For the individual bettor, the takeaway is unglamorous and worth repeating against the noise of the next six weeks: the value is in shopping lines and betting small, not in chasing every one of 104 matches. The biggest betting event in history will be a great one to watch. It does not have to be one you bet every minute of.
Disclosure: BettingInUnitedStates earns affiliate commissions when readers open accounts with some sportsbooks (FanDuel and Fanatics among them) through links on this site. We cover the industry and our commercial partners on the same factual terms regardless; this note is here so you can weigh it for yourself.
Sources: CNBC, "The World Cup will likely be the biggest gambling event in history" by Contessa Brewer (June 10, 2026), including estimates from Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon, Deutsche Bank, and Piper Sandler analyst Patrick Moley; comments from Flutter CEO Peter Jackson, Caesars Digital SVP Dominic Hammond, and Gamban co-founder Matt Zarb-Cousin; American Gaming Association legal-access figures; and a SEON bettor survey. Analyst projections are estimates, not guarantees. Market-context and bettor-facing analysis are our own editorial commentary. This article is informational and not betting advice. 21+. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER.