Kalshi has struck a multi-year deal with the US Tennis Association (USTA) to become the exclusive Prediction Market Partner of the US Open as of 2026. Its name and brand are to appear on screens and signs all over the tournament grounds, in Flushing Meadows, and the company’s real-time data are to figure in the tournament’s coverage. In addition there will be:
- “exclusive experiences” for Kalshi users
- “premium hospitality” during the tournament
- “activations” at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center
- “original content” from the grounds
According to at least one report (YardBarker), no competitor to Kalshi may advertise at the Open. This matters because, Kalshi’s main competitor, Polymarket, became the Official Prediction Market Provider of the ATP Tour last month. It managed this by striking a deal with Tennis Data Innovations (TDI), the joint venture between ATP and ATP Media that manages the tour’s data and streaming rights – Challenger matches included.
Kalshi’s partnership with the USTA, says company co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour, will enable spectators to deepen their understanding of the sport “through the power of open markets, live price discovery, and the wisdom of crowds.” Continually refreshed odds, the company claims, present such an improvement on regular statistics that trading volume in prediction markets has risen year-on-year by a factor of 25.
The deal, according to Mansour, provides for the building of an “integrity framework grounded in data-sharing, education, and market surveillance.” Kalshi will be refusing to offer odds on umpire decisions, injuries or code violations, so as to avoid what it calls “any perverse incentives,” but it has also struck a second deal, for data sharing, with the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA). Founded in 2021 by the ATP, the WTA, World Tennis (now the ITF) and the Grand Slams, the ITIA succeeded the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU), which sought to check corruption and doping in professional tennis from 2008 to 2020.
Not everyone is pleased.
Complaints
Jon Wertheim, of Sports Illustrated, writes on X: “Not a week goes by when the tennis’ Integrity unit – that you help fund – fails to announce a match-fixing scandal…and you take sponsorship $ from a platform predicated on profiting from inside information? No way to spin this as a positive….”
Meanwhile, Italian tennis player Matteo Berrettini has qualified sports betting as a “complicated issue.” Speaking at this year’s Open after his victory over Switzerland’s Stan Wawrinka, Berrettini said that his brother had “received messages on his phone containing threats against my family and things like that” and wondered whether “a stronger framework” or “a stronger committee” might protect the players (UbiTennis). According to Berrettini, many of the threats arrive over Challenger matches – in Polymarket’s presumed territory.
Dual origins of the deals
The Kalshi and Polymarket deals mark the convergence of separate projects, pursued years apart and for different stated reasons.
First came electronic line-calling, which, in the form of Sony’s Hawk-Eye, first replaced line judges at Next Gen ATP Finals of 2017, in Milan. In 2020 government restrictions over Covid induced USTA to remove line judges from the Western & Southern Open and from all US Open courts outside Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong Stadiums. The Australian Open removed them in 2021 from its every court and stadium.
By April 2023 the ATP had committed to eliminating line judges tour-wide from 2025, for “accuracy and consistency.” The All England Club used the same words in October 2024 when it brought human line judging to an end at Wimbledon, after 147 years. Only Roland-Garros is still holding out.
Second, in 2020, came data. ATP and ATP Media established the aforementioned TDI, a joint venture to “manage and commercialise data across a variety of global markets, including betting, media and performance.” Betting was in the data mix from the start.
It was also in 2020 that Stats Perform secured the WTA’s official data rights, in a six-year deal. This ran on feeds from scouts and umpires rather than ball-tracking, and by March 2021 the data was already powering Sportradar’s in-play WTA odds.
Sportradar then won the ATP’s own global data and betting rights in March 2023, a month before the ATP’s line-judge announcement. In other words, the commercial pipeline was already under contract before the robots arrived.
By late 2025 Sportradar had also acquired IMG Arena, gaining the US Open’s, Wimbledon’s and Roland-Garros’s own data and audiovisual betting rights, independent of its ATP arrangement. Kalshi’s global infrastructure deal with Sportradar followed in June 2026, two months ahead of the USTA agreement. Polymarket, for its part, reached the ATP Tour through TDI directly.
