This week, professional sports crossed a threshold it had never crossed before. CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, began listing futures contracts on all 32 National Hockey League (NHL) teams.[1] These are not bets on who wins a game, but continuously priced financial indexes that move up or down with each team’s in-game statistical performance.

Each team index opens the season at a baseline of 7,500 points and shifts in real time based on goals, saves, takeaways, penalties, and other determined statistics, using a rules-based scoring methodology built by a Chicago startup called FutureSports and licensed exclusively from the NHL. Traders can go long or short. Positions can be taken on margin.

Major League Baseball (MLB) has also agreed to such futures contracts on each MLB team.  FutureSports announced its MLB partnership on September 22, just six days before the NHL contracts went live. The investment arms of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ and Boston Red Sox’s ownership groups, Elysian Park Ventures and John Henry’s family office, respectively, played a direct role in brokering the MLB deal.[2] Other financial backers reportedly include the Chicago Cubs’ ownership group, Marquee Ventures, and the trading platform Robinhood.[3] It is unclear when the MLB indexes for each team will go live, but the NHL futures contracts are available for purchase as the NHL season starts this week.

This is a genuinely new species of financial product, and it deserves scrutiny before the enthusiasm outruns the risk disclosures. These products are like other futures products that are based off indexes that move up or down. Each team’s index is continuously changing according to both in game metrics as well as after a game, after a month, and at the end of the season. The index for each team started at 7,500 and will change depending upon how the team plays and the season progresses. These novel products are different from traditional sports betting as well as prediction markets as outlined below:

How these futures contracts are different from a sportsbook bet.  Sports bettors can wager money on the outcome of a game (who will win) as well as specific other outcomes such as how many total points will be scored (over/under), or “prop” bets that deal with individual player and team statistics such as whether a named player scores a goal, takes a penalty, makes a certain number of hits, and more. To this extent, the sportsbook pays the sports bettor if the outcome happens. As an example, if the bet is that the Washington Capitals will beat the New York Rangers, and that happens, then the sportsbook pays those who placed that bet. The bet resolves at the end of the game.

However, these NHL indexes do not resolve. They continuously move, absorbing in-game and after-game statistics. This is exactly like other stock indexes that continuously move.  The financial product is based off the indexes and not the index itself. Therefore, the futures contracts based off each team’s index are considered derivative products and thus federally regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). CME and FutureSports are structuring the indexes as continuous benchmarks rather than binary settlement contracts. The methodology for the sports financial indexes has been designed to align with the International Organization of Securities Commissions’ Principles for Financial Benchmarks.[4]

How these futures contracts are different from a prediction market.  As I have written  here,[5] prediction markets such as Kalshi, Polymarket, and others are locked in an active, unresolved legal battle over whether sports-event contracts are federally regulated derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act or state regulated gambling products. Most agree that the issue will reach the Supreme Court. However, FutureSports’ model was deliberately built to sidestep that fight. Instead of a yes or no contract on a single event, these futures contracts are priced off of a continuously valued index. But regulators have not yet definitively blessed that distinction, and investors should not assume the “CFTC-regulated” label forecloses future jurisdictional challenges simply because the product was engineered to avoid prediction markets’ current fight.

Although CME describes these contracts as trading in a CFTC-regulated marketplace, there is some regulatory history with sports futures.  In 2020, the CFTC raised concerns that Eris Exchange’s proposed sports futures amounted to sports gambling, and Eris ultimately withdrew its products. What has changed since 2020 is that the CFTC has taken a friendlier approach to novel markets, including supporting sports-event contracts in prediction markets as federally regulated products. Nevertheless, investors should not mistake a permissive regulator for a settled legal question.

How these futures contracts are different from stocks.  A share of stock represents a claim on a company’s future cash flows, discounted by some rational (if imperfect) model of value.  However, a sports performance index represents nothing but the statistical output of athletes playing a game. There is no earnings report, no balance sheet, no fundamental anchor at all. CME’s own marketing leans into this, describing the product as “a pure-play asset class that moves independently of inflation and interest rates.”[6] This is actually the problem with these contracts: An asset with no connection to macroeconomic fundamentals also has no floor.  A team’s index can move on a season-ending injury, a trade-deadline blockbuster, or a winning streak with the same volatility a meme stock moves on a tweet. Unlike a meme stock, though, there is no underlying business that will eventually re-anchor the price to something real.

In addition, my earlier research on legalized sports betting found that sports betting measurably crowds out long-term saving and investing.  Sports betting delivers the instant gratification of gambling while increasingly being marketed and experienced as akin to investing.  These new futures contracts eliminate that distinction. This is not betting dressed up to feel like investing.  Rather, these indexes are a genuine, regulated financial instrument. Layering margin and leverage on top, as CME’s own materials do (“access larger market positions with less upfront capital”),[7] does not just repackage sports betting risks, it amplifies them.

Integrity risk is not hypothetical. Both the NHL and MLB have barred players, coaches, and league staff from trading these instruments, which is the correct call. Nevertheless, a financial product whose value is a direct function of athletic performance creates the same insider information and integrity incentives that have already produced enforcement actions in prediction markets. A sports performance index, continuously priced and directly tied to the same underlying information, is not immune from the same category of risk simply because it is wrapped in index methodology rather than a yes or no contract.

What this means going forward. None of this means sports performance indexes are illegitimate financial products. These futures contracts can become hedging tools for sponsors, broadcasters, and franchise-adjacent businesses. Marketing materials suggest even season ticket holders may benefit from this potential hedge against their investment by purchasing tickets for every game in advance.

Moreover, CME’s institutional backing lends real infrastructure and oversight relative to unregulated offshore sports books. With the MLB agreeing to a deal with FutureSports last week, the potential audience grows well beyond hockey. Co-founder of FutureSports Rhett Dinsdale said, “Our mission is to evolve sports or transition sports out of the binary, sort of, entertainment realm and into the institutional risk management sector.”[8]  That is a genuinely significant ambition. If prediction markets were the first step in creating an asset class from sports event contracts, these new futures contracts are furthering that goal. Hockey season starts this week, and now so does the ability to trade on it.

ENDNOTES

[1] CME Group, CME FSPI Sports Indexes and Futures, https://www.cmegroup.com/fspi (last visited Sept. 24, 2026).

[2] Jon Seidel, First Hockey, Now Baseball: FutureSports Deal with MLB Will Let Fans Bet on Teams, Chi. Sun-Times (Sept. 22, 2026), https://chicago.suntimes.com/technology/2026/09/22/hockey-baseball-futuresports-deal-mlb-fans-bet-teams.

[3] Id.

[4] CME Group, Sports Index Futures, https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/equities/sports-index-futures.html (last visited Sept. 24, 2026).

[5] See Roth, Melinda, Prediction Markets: Creating a New Asset Class from Ballots to Box Scores (August 13, 2025). Forthcoming __ Connecticut Law Review __, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5390765.

[6] CME Group, supra note 1.

[7] Id.

[8] Seidel, supra note 2.

Melinda Roth is a professor at New England Law School.