Talks Would Fill a Slot Left by an Exclusive Sportsbook Deal
The Athletic and Kalshi are in advanced talks over a sponsorship, Front Office Sports reported on Aug. 24, citing multiple sources. No deal has been finalized. One source told the outlet that The Athletic has held discussions with several betting and prediction-market companies since its Betmgm agreement expired earlier this year, though the other suitors were not identified. Spokespeople for The Athletic and Kalshi both declined to comment.
Oliver Darcy has followed up with his own report at Status that Kalshi is among the partners The Athletic has been talking to. Any agreement would apply strictly to the sports vertical rather than across the wider New York Times Co., he wrote, but would still require the parent company’s blessing.
This has not been the case with the previous, explicitly exclusive deal, which was arranged when The Athletic was still independent. Under a deal announced on Jan. 28, 2021, Betmgm became its exclusive sports betting partner in the U.S., anchored by a new content vertical called The Athletic Betting Hub carrying live odds, exclusive offers, and betting analysis across written, audio, and video – which is now defunct. The Times acquired The Athletic the following year. Neither the 2021 release nor either of this week’s reports gives the agreement’s term, and the expiry itself rests on the anonymous sourcing in both accounts.
The incoming partner is a different kind of company from the outgoing one. Betmgm is a licensed sportsbook operating state by state. Kalshi is a federally designated contract market that offers event contracts, holds no gaming license from any state regulator, and maintains that federal commodities law overrides state gambling statutes. That position is being tested in court while the talks proceed, including the Times’ home state: New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on July 31, seeking to bar it from the state and demanding $100,000 for each unauthorized sports-wagering offer plus three times its gain.
Chief executive Tarek Mansour has blamed casino-industry lobbying for that suit. In Utah, a federal judge granted the state summary judgment on Aug. 4, rejecting the preemption argument outright. The question is not settled against Kalshi everywhere: the Third Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction protecting it from New Jersey enforcement in April, and a Ninth Circuit ruling is pending.
None of that has slowed Kalshi’s media expansion: Fox Corporation began integrating Kalshi forecasts across its various media channels on April 7, joining CNN and CNBC. Fox held sports back from that initial rollout without ruling out expansion, and separately said it would not use Kalshi data for election coverage, where it maintains its own polling teams.
Advanced Fox-Kalshi talks were reported in March and the integration went live roughly a month later, a sequence worth keeping in mind when weighing how far along the current discussions may be. Rival Polymarket has gone further into print: Dow Jones has carried its data across The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, and Investor’s Business Daily since January under an exclusive partnership – as an editorial data feed rather than a sponsorship.
Kalshi and Athletic have already worked together on a smaller scale, the former having sponsored the latter’s content on Tiktok during the World Cup. Front Office Sports also reported that The Athletic is in talks with the NFL about distributing content on the league’s digital platforms, and has already arranged for some of its stories to be syndicated on NBA.com.
