Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The story of modern sports betting is ultimately a story about speed. What began as a pre-game activity has transformed into a continuous, real-time market as data infrastructure allows odds to update instantly during play. As wagering migrated in-play, it now resembles financial markets–attracting quantitative traders and rendering data latency, the interval between the capture of event data and its public dissemination, a decisive competitive advantage. Regulatory responses have focused on disclosure and consumer protection, borrowing from securities law frameworks. But, these approaches leave the central timing problem untouched. Because live betting is now latency-driven, effective regulation must equalize real-time data access, curb the monetization of speed, and limit vertical control over events, information, and wagering markets.

Historical Background of Sports Betting

Historically, sports betting was primarily a pre-game activity. According to a United Kingdom study, about 38% of bettors in 2015–2016 reported placing in-play wagers. This number rose to 45% the following year. Currently, in countries where sports betting is legal and soccer is the most popular sport, an estimated 70–80% of the bets are made during the game. 

This tectonic shift from pre-game wagering to dynamic, in-play betting was made possible by advances in data collection, processing, and transmission infrastructure. High-speed feeds and automated APIs now allow sportsbooks to update odds continuously during live events. As a result, control over real-time data has become a central competitive asset. Data-licensing agreements with leagues, exclusive distribution contracts, and investments in latency infrastructure are now core strategic expenditures. Major transactions reflect this reality: e.g., Endeavor agreed to pay up to $225 million to acquire a sports data and betting rights business. Such investments underscore that profitability in modern sports betting depends less on traditional bookmaking margins and more on speed, data control, and predictive capacity at scale.

Once speed and informational advantage became the primary determinants of profit, wagering environments began to resemble financial markets. Research shows that sports betting markets exhibit classic asset pricing anomalies such as momentum effects, where recent winners continue to outperform, and value effects, where undervalued teams generate excess returns–paralleling well-documented patterns in equity markets. Comparative research further highlights that financial exchanges and online betting platforms rely on similar market mechanisms, including continuous pricing, speculative positions, and tradable, state-contingent claims whose payoff depends on which future state of the world materializes. In both betting platforms and financial markets, participants act on heterogeneous information sets while platform infrastructures facilitate continuous price discovery. 

Wall Street has taken notice. Quantitative trading firms, including big names like DRW, Jump Trading, and Susquehanna International Group, have entered prediction markets, including sports betting, in droves. Their participation is not confined to sports; rather, it reflects a broader migration of high-frequency and derivatives-style trading strategies into event-driven markets. These firms ingest and operationalize real-time data at speeds that far exceed those of retail participants, leveraging infrastructure, modeling techniques, and technical expertise honed in electronic equity and options markets.

The convergence is not merely metaphorical. Dedicated prediction-market platforms such as Kalshi, who recently partnered with sports insurance broker Game Point Capital to hedge performance bonuses (at rates reportedly favorable to Kalshi), have begun offering event-based contracts that closely resemble derivatives markets. 

League Collaborations in the Modern Sports Betting Market

Compounding these concerns are the commercial collaborations between leagues and data distributors. The National Football League (NFL) now uses high-frequency, sensor-based tracking data capturing player location, speed, acceleration, and movement on every play. It has also licensed exclusive rights to distribute this official play-by-play data to Genius Sports, a sports data and technology company that provides official live data feeds and an array of other services. 

Genius’s delivery infrastructure maintains a median round-trip latency of under 37 milliseconds, meaning live sports and betting data arrive on average in under ~0.04 seconds and deliver 3 to 4 seconds ahead of video. In contrast, most ordinary bettors still rely on television or streaming broadcasts that are delayed by several seconds to tens of seconds relative to the actual game action. An ordinary bettor, as a result, is more often than not making a wager on an event that has already occurred in the stadium and is reflected in the sportsbook’s updated odds.

Policy Proposals Beyond Disclosure

Legal scholars and policymakers focused on consumer protection and market fairness have sought to address regulatory gaps in modern sports wagering. In a Cardozo Law Review note, Ryan Grandeau proposed Congress require mandatory disclosure of material sports data, drawing an analogy to Regulation FD, a securities regulation that promotes fair access to material information in securities markets. Federal proposals, such as the Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet Act (“SAFE Bet Act”), seek to establish minimum national standards for online sports betting, limits on personalized marketing and AI tracking, state-level financial screenings triggered by spending thresholds to assess whether wagering is proportionate to a bettor’s income, voluntary statewide bans requiring operators to block access and marketing, prohibitions on certain high-risk betting products like college proposition bets, along with public-health reporting and advertising limits.

Although disclosure and consumer protection measures provide important baseline safeguards, they do not address the structural harm created by latency asymmetries. Because latency advantages persist even in a fully transparent regime, meaningful reform requires structural interventions, including:

1) Mandating simultaneous access to official in-play data for all licensed sportsbooks on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, preventing leagues or data distributors from selling preferential speed advantages that distort competition; 

2) Imposing uniform latency floors—mandatory delays between on-field events and wager acceptance—to neutralize arbitrage and prevent exploitation of millisecond-level informational asymmetries; and

3) Treating official league data as a non-exclusive regulatory input, limiting the ability to assert proprietary control over real-time factual information.

Finally, these structural reforms could limit vertical integration between leagues, data providers, and sportsbooks, and reduce the risk that a single firm controls events, information, and betting markets simultaneously.

Conclusion

Live sports betting is a fundamentally latency-sensitive financial marketplace in which speed, data access, and vertical integration determine advantage. If regulators treat it solely as a consumer protection issue, they will overlook the market design choices that produce the asymmetry. The next phase of reform should move upstream: establishing uniform latency standards, mandating fair access to official data, scrutinizing vertical integration, and clarifying the regulatory treatment of sports-linked prediction contracts. Ensuring market integrity will require policymakers not simply to referee misconduct, but to architect the timing rules, data infrastructure, and competitive conditions that determine who can profit from the future before it arrives.