Of the five sports designs that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission singled out for disapproval in its proposed prediction markets rule of 12 June 2026 (91 FR 35806, RIN 3038-AF65), the first one is about somebody who is not trading. A player injury contract, in the Commission's proposed wording, settles "solely by reference to the duration, severity, occurrence, or medical diagnosis" of an injury sustained by a participant in the game. The list also reaches officiating calls, discrete in game actions, altercations and pre-collegiate games. Only this entry turns on a medical record.
Two designated contract markets now have a product on file that prices the same information without settling on it. Both moved settlement onto the official record of who took the field. And both, in the same filing, wrote club medical staff and athletic trainers into the list of people forbidden to trade it. That pairing is the point of this article. The category has worked out which input is sensitive, in enough detail to put it in a rulebook. What it has not written down is any standard owed to the person the input describes.
The line the Commission drew runs through the diagnosis
In the proposed amendments to Commission Regulation 40.11, player injury is negative public interest factor (a)(6)(iii)(B)(2), and the preamble gives three distinct reasons for it. First, the Commission writes that such contracts "create perverse financial incentives that could encourage or facilitate physical harm to athletes". Second, settlement would depend on medical diagnoses, which raises concerns about the confidentiality of medical information and the risk that it is leaked or exploited by insiders. Third, a physician's diagnosis or an injury report is not, in the Commission's preliminary view, an objective and manipulation resistant settlement basis.
Footnote 254 says where the first two reasons came from. The Commission cites a comment on its earlier advance notice, filed on 30 April 2026 by the National Football League Players Association, the Major League Baseball Players Association, the National Basketball Players Association, the National Hockey League Players' Association and the Major League Soccer Players Association, which argued that injury contracts should be prohibited partly because they involve personal medical information. The concern in the rule is borrowed, and the lender holds no position in the market.
One measurement shapes everything that follows. The proposal runs to roughly 76,500 words and the word privacy does not appear in it once. The interest is real enough to disfavour a whole contract category, and it still has no name in the document.
Five unions filed twice, and the readable letter is the second one
The April letter sits in the Commission's own comments portal rather than on the federal docket system, which makes the follow up the more useful document. On 27 July 2026 the same five unions filed again, into the rulemaking docket, where it is published as comment CFTC-2026-1189-0162, posted 28 July 2026. Two pages, addressed to Chairman Michael Selig.
Section II matters most here. The unions write that demand for non public information about athlete health and performance has grown along with these markets, that injuries and illnesses, performance metrics and biometric data are "uniquely personal to athletes", and they ask the Commission to ban the unauthorised use of that information by the entities it regulates. Their summary of the stake is one sentence: "The failure to implement such protections would open the door to fundamental invasions of privacy."
Two other asks are worth holding on to. The unions want a transparent and easy process to petition the Commission to remove a problematic contract. And in Section III they want athletes and their union representatives to receive the same information at the same time as the exchange and the regulator when league integrity data triggers an investigation into a named player. Neither is about listing. Both are about standing.
Both venues moved settlement onto the gamebook
The Commission's product registry is the primary record of what has been filed. It shows that KalshiEX self certified a template called "Will <athlete> participate in <event> <in/before> <time period>?" on 19 February 2026, three weeks before the staff advisory discussed below and four months before the proposal. The filed terms resolve on active competition, and they list the reasons a rostered athlete might not compete: "injury, suspension, voluntary withdrawal, visa denial, illness, or personal reasons". Any of them resolves the contract No. The terms also provide that if the athlete does not compete because they have died, the contract settles at the last fair price at the exchange's discretion.
On 25 August 2026 QCX LLC, trading as Polymarket US, self certified two filings for NFL American Football Player Participation Contracts, with a first iteration naming one quarterback and one Week 1 game. The terms and conditions are explicit about what settlement does not touch: "Pre-event injury reports, availability designations, active or inactive roster listings, projected or published lineups, and similar pre-event announcements are not determinative of the Contract Outcome. Settlement is based solely on actual participation as reflected in the official gamebook and play-by-play records." The registry records both filings as withdrawn on 26 August 2026, the day after certification, and gives no reason. Writing on 26 August, InGame reporter Daniel O'Boyle noted that Kalshi's equivalent had been live earlier that month and that there was then no public sign that the regulator had ordered anything taken down. As of 29 September 2026 the Kalshi template still reads Certified in the registry, which records the status of the filing rather than whether the contract is open.
Read as engineering, the redesign is competent. A gamebook is objective, league verified and published, which is exactly what positive factor (a)(6)(iii)(A)(3) of the proposal rewards, and nothing about the drafting is hidden.
The restricted list is where the medical record shows up
What the redesign does not change is who sees the answer early, and both venues say so in writing. The Polymarket US filing prohibits trading by club personnel "with authority over, or advance knowledge of, player participation or availability decisions prior to their official publication", and then separately by "Club medical staff, athletic trainers, and other personnel with access to nonpublic injury, health, or availability information", plus household members and immediate family of everyone listed. Kalshi's Appendix B bars the athlete, then "Current and former coaches, trainers, medical staff, and support personnel" of that athlete, then the athlete's paid representatives, event staff, beneficial owners of the affiliated team, and again the household members of all of them.
So a contract that does not settle on a medical fact is still policed as though the medical fact were the tradable asset, because it is. That is not a contradiction to score off anybody. It is the most useful admission in the file, and the reason a standard is writable at all: the people with the informational edge are few, named by role, and known to the club.
The hard part is scope rather than principle. Kalshi's filing states that a prohibition is scoped to the specific athlete and event iteration, so a trainer barred from one athlete's contract is not automatically barred from another's. That is defensible, and it means somebody has to rebuild the prohibited list for every athlete in every iteration, from a roster and staff feed, before the market opens. We made the same argument about a different contract class in the article on election settlement sources. The sports version has a shorter fuse, because the information moves in hours.
The league prints the body part and keeps the diagnosis
It helps to be exact about what is confidential. The National Football League publishes its own injury report, and on the league's injury page for Week 3 of the 2026 season, read on 29 September 2026, every row carries a named player, a position, the body part, the practice status and the game status. The existence of the injury is not a secret. The league discloses it on a schedule, for integrity reasons.
What is not published is the diagnosis behind the body part, the prognosis, and everything the club knew before the filing deadline. That narrows the confidentiality concern and makes it harder rather than easier, because the asset is a timing advantage measured in hours and held by a handful of identifiable people. Staff at the Division of Market Oversight put the question to exchanges in CFTC Letter 26-08, dated 12 March 2026, which tells a designated contract market to consider "the extent to which a third party has, or will adopt, safeguards against unauthorized or premature release" of the key data used to derive a settlement value. For an availability contract the third party is a football club, and the key data is a medical chart.
A statistics contract prices the same health question
The proposal also pushes in the other direction. Positive factor (a)(6)(iii)(A)(1) treats settlement on aggregate outcomes, expressly including "individual or team statistical performance", as weighing against a finding that a contract is contrary to the public interest, and (A)(2) adds a separate factor for aggregate statistical performance of an individual over a game. An under contract on one player's yardage is therefore favoured by the same document that disfavours settlement on that player's diagnosis, and it pays out on the same underlying fact. The unions noticed, and their July letter names so called under bets in the same breath as injuries and penalties.
The Commission is not blind to this. General factor (a)(5)(ii) applies to every contract within the special rule and asks whether it creates "particular risks of information leakage or exploitation of material non-public information by insiders". In the cost and benefit discussion the Commission goes further and concedes the limit of the tool it is relying on: eligibility screens and surveillance "cannot perfectly eliminate trading by people with privileged access (e.g., team staff, medical personnel, broadcast insiders)". An enforcement order in the mention markets case showed what that residual looks like when the privileged access belongs to somebody nobody had listed.
Ohio made this decision and published the arithmetic
A regulator has done this already, and left a usable record. On 23 February 2024 the executive director of the Ohio Casino Control Commission, Matthew Schuler, approved a request by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to prohibit player specific proposition wagers on college competition, under a state statute that lets a sports governing body ask for exactly that. Licensed operators were invited to comment by 12 February 2024 and to supply auditable data, and the standard was good cause, measured by whether the prohibition would protect the integrity of sports gaming or serve the best interests of the public.
The decision then published the cost. The affected wagers were about 2.2 per cent of available selections on an average platform, about 0.747 per cent of wagers placed during 2023, roughly 104.6 million dollars out of about 7.65 billion dollars staked in the state that year, and about 2.51 million dollars of tax. The benefit is one sentence an operator can test: "a decrease in the availability of these types of wagers could lead to a decrease in harassment." Whatever one thinks of the outcome, three features are worth copying. A third party had a door, the venues were heard on the record, and the number was published rather than asserted.
The only party with a right to respond is the exchange
Compare the federal procedure. Under the draft, the Commission opens a review with a written determination identifying the enumerated activity, the contract terms at issue and the factors warranting review, the prediction market gets 30 days to respond in writing, and any order must contain findings weighing the factors on both sides. We have argued in the article on the right to respond that this is a real gain for venues, and it is. It is also the only procedural right the document creates. The phrase due process occurs once in the proposal, in the passage praising that framework, and the beneficiary is the exchange.
Nothing in the proposal answers the unions' second and third asks. There is no route for a non customer to ask that a contract be reviewed, no published list of participants barred for conduct, and no notice owed to an athlete whose data triggered an inquiry. Meanwhile the analysis arguing that each of these contracts serves the public interest is the part of the file nobody outside the Commission can read. Polymarket US marked its explanation and analysis confidential under Commission Regulation 145.9; Kalshi filed a detailed confidential treatment request under the same regulation and asked for five years. Under Directive 02 that is the wrong half of the file to seal.
Publishing the scope of the ban is cheaper than defending it later
Two lines of our manifest apply here. Directive 01: "Resolution rules are published before a market opens and are not revised while money is at risk." Directive 02: "Fees, spreads, settlement sources, custody arrangements and conflicts of interest are stated in plain language on the surface where the trade happens." A prohibition on the club doctor is a conflict of interest control, and it lives in a self certification the doctor will never open.
Six things a venue listing any market that turns on one person's availability can publish without waiting for a final rule:
- The restricted categories, in the words the filed terms already use, on the market card itself, so that a club physician or an athletic trainer learns of the prohibition from the product rather than from a federal docket.
- Who rebuilds that list for each athlete and each event, on what feed, and how long before the market opens.
- A named route for somebody who is not a customer, with a stated reading time and a stated set of possible answers. The Ohio statute is a serviceable template.
- The settlement source hierarchy in plain language, with the sentence the filings already contain, that pre publication availability and health material does not determine the outcome.
- The answer the March advisory asks for, in public: what safeguards the upstream holder of the key data has against premature release, and what the venue does on the day it learns of one.
- What happens to open positions when a designation moves after the last trade, written down before it happens rather than decided when it does.
None of that requires a venue to drop a product, and none of it concedes that availability markets are illegitimate. Whether a named athlete plays is the sort of question a prediction market answers well, and the league that supplies the settlement record publishes its own injury report. What the category is missing is smaller than a listing ban and more embarrassing. It is a page explaining, to a person who never opened an account and signed nothing, how a market about them works and who to write to when it does not.