A top soccer club in Spain placed a “multimillion dollar bet against itself” on the prediction market Kalshi, Semafor reports — as an insurance policy.

The unnamed club was at risk of being relegated from La Liga, the top flight of Spanish football and the stomping ground of giants like Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. 

Being demoted to a lower league — a scenario that may be unfamiliar for American sports fans, where the largest sports leagues are franchised — is financially ruinous, chiefly because it means losing out on lucrative TV broadcast revenue. In the 2024-2025 season, the pool of money shared between the twenty teams competing in the division was over $1.4 billion, with two of the largest sides raking in over $150 million each.

The club’s relegation potentially hinged on its final game of the season. If it lost by a large enough margin and was booted down, the multimillion dollar Kalshi bet — or perhaps more accurately, hedge — would help cushion the enormous losses the club would incur.

Fortunately for the club, a 1-0 loss was a slim enough defeat to stay up. On the other side of the bet, according to Semafor, was the quant trading firm Susquehanna, which bagged more than $1 million.

The Spanish side didn’t directly place the bet. Instead, it went to the sports insurance broker Game Point Capital. The firm, rather than taking out a traditional insurance policy, opted to enlist another firm called Greenlight Commodities to act as a middleman and place the Kalshi bets on its behalf. Editorializing, the Semafor reporting describes this as a path “familiar to anyone on Wall Street,” suggesting that this is legally above-board.

“Kalshi and Polymarket are more valuable as platforms to match institutional risk than vibes-based casinos,” it argues.

Still, given how serious an infringement match fixing is, how sports leagues are already mired in betting scandals, and the controversy surrounding prediction markets as a hotbed of insider trading, the affair does raise eyebrows — and comes amid these platforms making a heavy push into sports.

In February, Kalshi inked a deal with Game Point Capital to hedge against the financial risks in sports teams’ contracts. To sweeten the pot, Kalshi said it was offering prices at half the rate of traditional reinsurers. “We want to offer the most efficient pricing for teams and other clients,” Game Point Capital CEO Will Hall told The New York Time’s DealBook newsletter at the time.

In April, the North American arm of La Liga announced a partnership with Polymarket to provide fans “with more opportunities to engage with their favorite league and players.”

While prediction markets are growing as an alternative form of sports insurance, the practice may be operating in a legally grayer area than operatives involved would like to admit. Numerous states have moved to ban prediction markets, with some specifically targeting sports betting on the platforms. 

So have some countries, including Spain. Late last month, the nation’s Consumer Rights Ministry temporarily banned Kalshi and Polymarket for operating without a gambling license. The La Liga side may have sidestepped this ban by placing the bets through overseas parties, but it could arguably still be violating the spirit of the ban, and doesn’t preclude it from receiving critiques over the ethics of such an arrangement.

At press time, La Liga didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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