Eric Foote lived the gold rush.
He was chief commercial officer at then well-capitalized sportsbook PointsBet in 2021, when the NFL opened sports betting as a sponsor category. PointsBet was among the bidders when the league selected competitors FanDuel, DraftKings and Caesars as its official sportsbooks in five-year deals together valued at nearly $1 billion.
PointsBet signed on for the next best thing, paying for an authorized operator designation that allowed it to spend heavily to advertise during NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”
To do so, it also had to agree to buy NFL official data provided exclusively by Genius, a low latency product he didn’t think necessary considering the relatively lengthy span between plays.
Now founder and CEO of VIG Partners, a sports betting consultancy that works with leagues, teams and media properties, Foote struck an empathetic tone when hearing FanDuel and DraftKings had let their pricey NFL sponsorship deals expire rather than sign on for hefty increases in the cost of the league’s official data stream.
Sportsbooks have seen their margins on NFL betting “just chopped; totally grinded away” by Genius’ rates for official data, Foote said. Operators have squawked about the price and railed against each Genius increase, but unplugging was never a realistic option, since it was a requirement of a league sponsorship they valued, which they were locked into through 2025.
FanDuel and DraftKings are eager to remain as NFL sponsors, sources said. But, as Foote points out, the dynamics that led them to spend upward of $60 million a year each in 2021 — and pay a premium for data on top of it — have changed. Since that deal was signed, they’ve each opened in 14 more states, including New York, Ohio, Massachusetts and Arizona. That work is done. And there’s no clear path to the three big ones that remain, California, Texas and Georgia.
Even if there were, DraftKings and FanDuel have been advertising in those states during NFL games for almost five years.
“They’ve already rented the NFL customer through their last deal,” Foote said.
There’s also far less competition in the category than there was in 2021, when nearly a dozen had ambitions of competing nationally. Penn, which failed with Barstool and ESPN as its brands, and BetMGM have switched their priorities back to their casinos, both retail and online. Since dialing back an initially robust national ad campaign in 2022, Caesars CEO Tom Reeg has told analysts to expect expenses from its sports deals to roll off the books as they expire.
Fanatics, which aired it first Super Bowl spot in February, is the lone newcomer with the heft to make a play.
“Although The Shield means billions and billions of dollars,” Foote said, “there’s not a line of operators in sports betting that want to spend the money or are going to line up for this. There’s two or three, if that.”
With all that said, the NFL still has this in its quiver: Even if a sportsbook forgoes a league sponsorship, it still must buy official data to advertise during NFL games.
“The NFL is too big for FanDuel and DraftKings to sit out, and vice versa,” Foote said. “The NFL needs those two as partners. This is not just dollars and cents. It’s that image. It’s the brand. It’s the credibility. It’s the integrity. It’s all that stuff that’s very, very important. So I think that a deal will get done, but the amount of dollars that the operators are going to pay vs. what they did are going to be a hell of a lot more favorable to the operators. I think they have the leverage.”
Cautious prediction
It seems inevitable that the noise around prediction markets will influence the sponsorship talks. Of late, FanDuel and DraftKings have pushed hard to get predictions rolled into all their deals, Foote said, or at least to get a right of first refusal if a property breaks out the category, as MLB recently did in its exclusive deal with Polymarket.
The NFL waded into betting so cautiously that it’s hard to picture it hurrying to attach to Polymarket or Kalshi, the latter of which is embroiled in upward of 20 lawsuits aimed at shutting down its sports business. Poly likely would have been served that many times, too, had it been up and running as long.
Still, any three- or five-year sportsbook sponsor deal the league signs will have to contemplate a world in which prediction markets are blessed by the courts, allowing California and Texas to remain open for the next contract’s full term.
“I know firsthand, working with some of my clients on prediction markets, everyone is trying to put their stake in the ground on that category — to block, defend, whatever it is,” Foote said. “I know how aggressive everybody is trying to be to cover the prediction market category in their deals.”
