Polymarket on Thursday reached an exclusive multiyear agreement with Serie A, marking the third major soccer league to partner with Polymarket this year after MLS and LaLiga.

Serie A is the highest tier of soccer in Italy. Under the deal, Polymarket will be the “official and exclusive” prediction-market partner of Serie A in the U.S. It will be allowed to use Serie A logos and marks on its platform and will receive access to official league data. Integrity monitor Genius Sports will provide data services as part of the agreement. The news will be announced later Thursday. 

Polymarket’s president of sports business development, Ari Borod, tells Front Office Sports the decision to focus on just the U.S. for now was deliberate.

“We want to invest heavily in the U.S. market,” he says. “There may be opportunities to do bigger deals in the future. Right now, it’s the beginning of the partnership. You want to grow into these things, and we felt this was the right place to kick this off.”

Borod, who was previously chief business officer of Fanatics before being hired by Polymarket in February, says Polymarket’s goal is to “represent the official exchange for traders in the U.S.”

“We want to build an ecosystem focused on a great product with integrity and all the safeguards you need,” he says. “The best way to do that is to go to the rights holders, leagues, and governing bodies themselves to forge partnerships.”

Polymarket has gobbled up soccer partners ahead of the upcoming World Cup, which begins next month. In January, it reached a deal with MLS, followed by an April agreement with LaLiga under which Polymarket became the Spanish league’s exclusive prediction-market platform in the U.S. and Canada.

“The world is coming to America for the World Cup,” Borod says. “If ever there was a time to invest in soccer, we feel like this is it.”

One big soccer partner Polymarket does not have is the World Cup, which in April announced a deal with little-known ADI PredictStreet. That company is owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family—the largest and wealthiest of the UAE’s seven emirates—and is run by an executive who settled insider trading charges with the Indian government last year. Polymarket and Kalshi both reportedly balked at the World Cup’s reported asking price of around $150 million, sources tell FOS.

“We would have loved to partner with FIFA and the World Cup,” Borod says. “In terms of what the ultimate price was, I’m not sure.”

For Serie A, the deal with Polymarket is part of a push to gain more notoriety in the U.S. “The United States represents a key growth market for Serie A,” marketing and commercial director Michele Ciccarese said in a statement.

Cultivating Controversy

Polymarket, led by founder Shayne Coplan, has long been a controversial company. It was pushed offshore under a settlement with the Joe Biden–era Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) reached in January 2022, before being allowed back into the U.S. last year. Its U.S. app, which had featured a waiting list for months, opened to all U.S. users earlier this month.

Its offshore platform was allegedly used by a U.S. soldier who last month was indicted over claims he used inside information to make more than $400,000 trading on when the U.S. military would capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. There have also been viral articles about its “elusive” Panamanian headquarters and the eccentricities of Coplan, which reportedly include showing up late to meetings.

Borod says Polymarket doesn’t pay much attention to the noise.

“No, it does not have a particular impact,” he tells FOS. “You can’t believe everything you read in the press.”

Prediction markets in general have also garnered plenty of controversy since the beginning of last year, when Polymarket rival Kalshi began offering sports event contracts on its platform. Sports have become one of the biggest drivers of activity across prediction markets, and Polymarket has seized on the trend. It has non-soccer agreements with the NHL, MLB, and UFC—FOS reported that Polymarket’s deal with MLB is worth up to $300 million over four years. 

Serie A has not been immune to controversy either. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported there is chaos with the schedule because of overlap with a tennis tournament: “With just three days to go until the start of the penultimate round of Serie A fixtures, half the teams do not know when their matches will be played.” 

In April, The Telegraph reported that a number of Serie A players, including those from Inter Milan and Juventus, were involved in a prostitution ring, and that one of the women became pregnant following a party where people were using nitrous oxide.