Research questions some of the betting volume of the prediction market associated with FIFA
The analysis detects that 108 million of the 167 million dollars traded could come from repeated operations between related accounts.
An investigation by The Wall Street Journal has put the spotlight on ADI Predictstreet, the prediction markets platform commercially associated with FIFA.
The key to the news is in a very simple question: does all the money that the platform claims to have moved really correspond to bets made by different users?
According to research, it may not.
It is a platform where users can bet money on whether or not an event will occur.
For example: will Spain win a match?
One user can bet yes and another can bet no. Before the outcome is known, those positions can also be bought and sold.
It is, therefore, a system that looks a lot like a bet, although it is presented as a market in which users buy and sell positions on future events.
ADI Predictstreet would have moved around 167 million dollars until the end of September.
But the analysis indicates that approximately 108 million could correspond to operations carried out over and over again between related accounts.
This is what is known as circular operations.
A simple example: two people have 100 euros and sell the same object to each other twenty times.
On paper, they can say that they have carried out operations for 2,000 euros.
But they haven't really entered the market with 2,000 new euros. They've been repeatedly moving the same money.
That's precisely what's being researched at ADI Predictstreet.
The analysis detected 795 digital accounts that would have received money from the same account related to the platform's commission system.
The suspicion is that some of that movement might have made it seem like there was more activity and more real money being traded than actually existed between independent users.
Because ADI Predictstreet is not just any platform.
FIFA chose it as the official prediction market partner for the 2026 World Cup.
That gave it enormous visibility and allowed it to create markets related to matches, national teams and players using official data from the competition.
Precisely because of this relationship, the case takes on a greater dimension: the investigation does not only affect a small platform, but a company commercially linked to one of the largest sporting events in the world.
When the agreement was announced, FIFA assured that there would be controls to detect suspicious transactions and ensure transparency.
Now, this research raises questions about how the platform's volume of activity is actually being calculated.
The underlying issue is easy to understand: if a platform says it has moved 167 million dollars, it is important to know if that money comes from thousands of different users or if a significant part corresponds to the same money circulating repeatedly between related accounts.
