Digital Wager Wire highlights the most significant events affecting the domestic and international sports betting and gaming industries each week throughout the year.
FanDuel Implements Strategic Structural Changes
Flutter Entertainment is not letting its subsidiary and mobile sports betting juggernaut, FanDuel, rest on its laurels as the USA’s most popular digital sportsbook. The plummeting stock price has made investors jittery, considering it has plunged from nearly $307 per share in August 2025 to $93.96 as of Monday.
The first-quarter earnings call was also concerning due to the cracks in what was once FanDuel’s seemingly invincible armor. The modest 1% year-over-year revenue increase was as much as the company could hope for, considering that its handle dropped 9% and its active sportsbook customers decreased by 6% from a year ago.
The most notable casualty came on May 6th when CEO Amy Howe was let go after a five-year stint at the top of North America’s most popular sportsbook. She has been replaced by Christian Genetski, who was the company’s former president.
“There’s a bunch of organizational changes that we’ve made, which I think really will sharpen our focus on execution and delivery, which ultimately has been one of our challenges,” Flutter CEO Peter Jackson said.
Furthermore, Jackson has been candid in his assessment of FanDuel’s performance and the measures that should have been taken last year. One of the most critical missteps in Jackson’s opinion was not offering more incentives when customers were bleeding money to the sportsbooks at the end of last year’s NFL regular season.
“We saw very high margins in Q4, which to some extent supports our view of where our gross margins can get to, but we didn’t execute well on generosity,” Jackson added. “So, we ended up starting this year with a smaller customer base than anticipated.”
Pennsylvania Considering Prediction Market Tax
Prediction markets continue to offer sports event contracts throughout the United States under the federal regulatory authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Firms like Kalshi and Polymarket insist they are allowed to do so and not pay a penny in state taxes because they are federally licensed and that the CFTC’s authority supersedes that of the states in which they operate.
However, there has been a legal firestorm raging for approximately 15 months, the same time Kalshi began offering sports event contracts for the 2025 Super Bowl. Conflicting state, federal, and appellate court rulings have only muddied the legal waters, but thus far, the prediction markets continue to operate despite a few judicial setbacks.
It is unlikely that there will be any definitive legal clarification unless the US Supreme Court hears the case, and that appears to be increasingly likely. The highest court in the land will have to determine whether the CFTC’s federal authority allows its licensees to operate with impunity and unfettered in states with and without legal gaming industries.
