The Summer of Sport

Over a million people gathered in Madrid to celebrate their World Cup heroes this afternoon, the final act of a tournament that felt like much more than just a tournament. 

The Argentinian team will probably get a hero's welcome in Buenos Aires, too. They would in Bangladesh, for sure.

Countless Bangladeshis gathered at watch parties this summer to cheer on Argentina, whose national team has an estimated 70 million fans in Bangladesh.

The population of Argentina is 45 million.

The phenomenon dates to 1986, when Bangladeshis crowded around the small television sets that were becoming common in the country just as Diego Maradona was becoming a superstar at the World Cup.

Forty years later, they gathered in record numbers to watch Messi on giant outdoor screens.

It’s part of what’s made the summer of 2026 the Summer of Sport: the role of sport in bringing people together has never been bigger. 

It helped that the NBA Finals were in New York City, the world’s biggest stage. More than two million people attended the Knicks’ championship parade last month.

I’d estimate that roughly half of them could not have named two players on the Knicks’ roster two months earlier. But they got caught up in the communal experience of a miraculous playoff run.

It helped as well that the World Cup was held in the United States, the epicenter of the attention economy, where everything is super-sized, commercialized, and over the top.

Where else could on-field seats sell for $1 million, and an 11-minute half-time show feature six celebrity performers?  (Plus the Muppets.)

But the tournament’s real value was the way it brought people together. Europeans marveled at Waffle House breakfasts and free refills of coffee. Americans learned the Viking row. Peruvians named their babies “Haaland.”

All of it was shared online, and, for one glorious month people everywhere found themselves in the same global conversation.

This, Adam Kelly says, is why we’re in “a golden age of sport.”

“Sport has this unique ability to tap into the highest-value part of the attention economy and also into the experience economy,” the President of IMG explains. “It taps into community and passion, and it requires an extra commitment from audiences to make a positive decision to engage, to make that appointment to view.”

“Nothing else does that," he adds.

Watching sports is a uniquely social activity, whether you’re in a crowd at the stadium or at a watch party in a city square.

Or home alone, even: watching sports prompts us to text with friends, because we know they’re watching, too.

That’s a rare thing. In this age of atomized media consumption, it’s become harder than ever to connect with people over shared experiences.

Unfortunately, AI is likely to make our media consumption even more atomized — which will make the communal experience of watching sports even more important.

Maybe irreplaceably so. Sports is “the antidote to AI,” Adam Kelly says, and “the last bastion of human content that can cut through the AI noise.”

That might be what made this Summer of Sport feel so big.

In an increasingly fragmented world, moments that bring everyone together are increasingly important.

The Summer of Prediction Markets

When we weren’t texting about the World Cup, we were betting on it.

Kalshi averaged over $1 billion of bets on the World Cup per day during the tournament. 

Yesterday, the market for the final game attracted $1.9 billion alone.

(The non-stop ticker they have on the website showing every transaction was mesmerizing.) 

The World Cup has ballooned prediction-market betting to all-time highs. Volumes are now 10x what they were at the peak of the 2024 election — when people thought prediction markets were mostly just for elections.

Traditional sportsbooks have done well, too: they’re expected to handle nearly nine times as much betting on this World Cup as they did on the last one.

But they’re losing share. H2 Gambling Capital estimates that prediction markets accounted for roughly 27% of US sports-betting during the World Cup, up from 9% at the start of the year.

The first reason for this was, well, predictable: prediction markets make sports betting universally available.

They are legal in all 50 states, while sportsbooks remain illegal in 11. By law, sportsbooks require bettors to be 21; prediction markets can take your bets from 18. On-chain markets sometimes don’t KYC at all.

A second reason was less foreseeable: prediction markets feel familiar.

They have prices instead of odds; price charts instead of virtual betting slips; fees instead of spreads (and the fees are much lower).

All this makes it feel like you’re trading, if not investing. 

You’re not, of course. You’re gambling. But the distinction is becoming blurred.

If you have a Robinhood account, for example, you can conveniently shift your investment savings into sports betting, because Robinhood has its own prediction market now.

“Trade All in One Place,” their website says. “Manage your portfolio on Robinhood: stocks, ETFs, crypto, options, futures, and prediction markets.

Soon, we might even be able to do our sports betting on the stock market. The Subversive All Season Sports ETF proposes to actively manage prediction-market sports betting on behalf of ETF investors.

I wouldn’t recommend it, though.

For all its popularity, betting on sports is a negative-sum activity. Outsourcing that activity to an ETF manager eliminates the one thing that makes sports betting worthwhile: getting you to watch the games.

Ideally, with friends.

— Byron Gilliam