The National Football League (NFL) entered April without a single official sportsbook partner for the first time since 2021, as its trio of existing deals with FanDuel, DraftKings, and Caesars each expired at midnight on March 31 without renewal. The lapse coincides with a period when the league is facing scrutiny over in-game betting practices.
Pricing Dispute Over Genius Sports Data Halts Negotiations
2021 marked the first time the NFL anointed official sports betting partners. The three partnerships, first signed in April of that year, were each five-year agreements worth collectively close to $1 billion. Now, none of FanDuel, DraftKings, and Caesars renewed before the March 31 deadline, according to an SBJ report confirmed by NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk. Negotiations between the NFL and its two largest partners, FanDuel and DraftKings, stalled over a price increase for official streaming data distributed through Genius Sports, the league’s exclusive real-time data provider. Caesars was not expected to renew its deal regardless of the data pricing dispute.
Genius Sports, which powers over 98% of legalized U.S. sports betting on NFL games according to the league’s own website, extended its exclusive data deal with the league through the 2030 season in June 2025. The NFL was Genius Sports’ largest shareholder from 2021 to 2025, receiving 22.5 million shares across the original deal and the subsequent extension. To date, it remains the company’s second-largest shareholder, with CEO Mark Locke overtaking the league following a private equity selloff in mid-2024.
The league told SBJ it remains open to “various league partnership structures,” a signal that could include an exclusive arrangement with a single operator rather than the three-partner model used since 2021. With FanDuel and DraftKings controlling roughly two-thirds of the U.S. sportsbook market, alternatives capable of replacing their spending are limited.
Product Liability Lawsuit Alleges Addictive Microbetting
The absence of a replacement deal comes against a backdrop of growing legal scrutiny over the league’s role in the national sports betting ecosystem. On March 24, the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) at Northeastern University filed a product liability lawsuit in Philadelphia naming the NFL itself as a defendant alongside DraftKings, FanDuel, and Genius Sports. The complaint notably does not name Caesars, the third expired partner, as a defendant.
The complaint alleges the companies developed and distributed online sports betting platforms engineered to be addictive, specifically targeting microbetting — rapid in-game wagers on individual plays like whether the next play will be a pass or a run, if a third-down conversion attempt will succeed, or the outcome of the next drive. These wagers settle within seconds and are powered by the same Genius Sports data pipeline at the center of the partnership pricing dispute.
The suit was brought on behalf of two Pennsylvania residents who claim they developed severe gambling addictions, drawing explicit parallels to tobacco industry litigation. It alleges DraftKings and FanDuel used AI-driven push notifications and personal VIP hosts to escalate betting behavior, even after one plaintiff indicated he wanted to stop. “Following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry, the online sports gambling industry has developed a highly addictive, difficult-to-resist product that bombards consumers with dozens of betting opportunities every minute of the day,” PHAI Litigation Director Andrew Rainer said in a statement.
According to the Boston Globe, DraftKings, FanDuel and the NFL did not respond to requests for comment about the case. A Genius Sports spokesman also declined to address the litigation. U.S. sports betting generated a record $16.96 billion in revenue in 2025 on $166.94 billion in total wagers, according to the American Gaming Association. The NFL remains the single most-wagered sport in the country.