Share 
On Tuesday, Kalshi listed NFL contracts on whether individual players will take the field in Week 1.
By Wednesday, the category was gone. Kalshi has made no public announcement about the removal, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filing covering the product from Feb. 19 still exists.
The listed NFL player availability contracts had been scheduled to run until Sept. 15.
Following the path of Polymarket
Polymarket introduced its first NFL player‑availability contract last month. “Will Patrick Mahomes participate in the Kansas City Chiefs’ Week 1 regular-season game?” was filed on Aug. 25 and pulled the next day.
A Polymarket source told ESPN that the CFTC asked Polymarket and other operators to remove this specific type of contract, leading to the withdrawal. An exchange files a product with the CFTC and lists it unless the agency objects. The commission can still open a review and prohibit contracts it finds contrary to the public interest. It did that with Kalshi’s election contracts in 2023.
Neither company called the products injury markets, which are not allowed at any legal U.S. sportsbook. The wording matters because the CFTC’s proposed rules for event contracts would ban injury contracts.
Injury rule details
The CFTC’s proposed rules state that event contracts that “explicitly settle solely by reference to the duration, severity, occurrence, or medical diagnosis of an injury sustained by a specific athlete raise serious public interest concerns.”
The commission gave three reasons:
- Event contracts create “perverse financial incentives that could encourage or facilitate physical harm to athletes.”
- Settlement that depends on confidential medical information insiders could leak.
- Injury reports don’t provide a “sufficiently objective, verifiable, and manipulation-resistant basis for contract settlement.”
Previously, the NFL asked the CFTC to prohibit contracts tied to injuries, and in April the players’ associations of all five major professional sports leagues jointly told the CFTC that “negative” contracts on whether an athlete is “injured or penalized” should be banned.
Kalshi listings mirrored injury lists
As of Tuesday, 19 of the 23 players with Kalshi availability contracts also appeared on ESPN’s NFL injury list.
Kalshi’s “NFL Week 1: Players to Compete” listings resolved to yes if a player took at least one snap, even if the snap was nullified by a penalty. Per Kalshi’s rules, a player listed as active who never took the field resolved the contract to no.
The rules list why that might happen: “injury, suspension, voluntary withdrawal, visa denial, illness, or personal reasons.”
