When Peter Jackson, the chief executive of Flutter Entertainment, unveiled plans to shift the gambling giant’s main stock market listing from London to New York in 2024, few in the City were surprised.
Though best known as the owner of Paddy Power and Sky Bet in Britain, the US was quickly becoming its most promising market thanks to a historic loosening of sports betting laws.
Two years on, things have not gone entirely to plan. FanDuel, Flutter’s massive US sports betting brand, ended 2025 “with a smaller customer base than anticipated” and has been spending heavily to hang onto its customers. Revenue and profit forecasts have been slashed.
At the same time, Flutter has been caught off-guard by the rise of “prediction markets” such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which effectively allow people to bet on everything from geopolitics to commodities and culture — as well as sports.
The group’s shares have tanked, dropping almost 70 per cent since August 2025 and wiping almost $40 billion (£30 billion) from Flutter’s market value. Last week they were trading lower than in 2015, when the company was formed from the merger of Paddy Power and Betfair.
Jackson, who has led Flutter since 2018, is under intense pressure to prove that his transatlantic wager is working — especially considering his personal compensation has swollen from £4.5 million in 2023 to £14.8 million in 2025, after his contract was revised in the wake of Flutter’s US listing.
With its share price languishing, large investors are said to be clamouring for change at the top. Earlier this month, Amy Howe, FanDuel’s chief executive for the past five years, was ousted in an attempt to quell their bloodlust.
America is far from the only troubled market for Flutter; Rachel Reeves has hiked gambling taxes in Britain, while the company was forced to withdraw from India altogether after Narendra Modi’s government enacted a nationwide ban on online gambling last year.
But for Jackson and his board, the US is its most pivotal market. He has called it Flutter’s “natural home” despite its Dublin roots.
FanDuel chief executive Amy Howe was forced outJEFF SCHEAR/GETTY IMAGES
The logic behind Flutter’s US pivot was sound. Britain, after all, is the world’s most mature, heavily regulated gambling market. America, comparatively, was virgin soil. Sports betting had been outlawed in every state but Nevada until 2018, when a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to set their own rules for the first time.
Since then, scores of states have embraced having a bet. Last year, sports betting grew 22.8 per cent to $17 billion, while online casino games — another area in which Flutter specialises — grew 27.6 per cent, according to according to the American Gaming Association (AGA).
In FanDuel, which began as a fantasy sports app, Flutter had a ready-made market leader with millions of customers. It maintains its top spot to this day with a market share of almost 40 per cent, while its rival, DraftKings — which also began as a fantasy sports firm — has about 33 per cent.
“They had the user base, they had the brand, so they were well ahead of everybody else,” said Andrew Tottenham, a gambling industry adviser.
“It led to DraftKings and Flutter being phenomenally successful and public market investors getting right behind them — and the market was looking increasingly like a duopoly, along with a couple of casino-oriented brands like BetMGM,” said an adviser to betting firms.
Staff at FanDuel’s offices in EdinburghCHRIS RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES
But maintaining their market share has been incredibly expensive. “[Rivals] spent ridiculous amounts of money to the point where you almost couldn’t make a profit out of any of the customers, so FanDuel and DraftKings had to do exactly the same,” said Tottenham. Many millions were spent on marketing, discounted bets and bonuses to keep people playing.
However, after years of explosive growth, the sports betting craze appears to be slowing in the US. Sports betting “handle” — industry speak for the total amount wagered before paying winners — grew just 0.9 per cent in February, while firms’ revenues declined by 6.4 per cent.
The US has a fragmented patchwork of legislation and taxes that differ state-by-state. This makes expansion costly: Flutter said this month that expanding into Arkansas alone would add $35 million in costs this year.
Some state governments, meanwhile, have embraced a more aggressive approach to taxation. In Illinois, for instance, state legislators have raised taxes from a flat 15 per cent rate on sportsbook revenues to as much as 40 per cent, and implemented a “wager fee” of up to 50 cents on most bets, win or lose, to raise money for public services. Flutter passed this on to its customers.
Other potentially lucrative states, such as Texas and California, have not opened up at all, while in Florida the native American Seminole Tribe have a legally enforced monopoly on sports betting.
Further complicating matters is that only a handful of states have so far legalised “iGaming” — online casino games and slots. “Everyone expected the iGaming space to regulate very rapidly — that’s where all the money is made. Typically, [firms] cross-sell you into iGaming. The margin is triple compared to sports betting,” said the adviser to betting firms.
“I think they saw sports betting as the Trojan horse: get that in first and then you can go for online casinos,” said Tottenham. “The mistake they made was that when they started promoting the idea, many politicians felt that they had been hoodwinked.”
While these headwinds have been gathering, prediction markets have been stealing a march. Companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket allow users to stake on everything from the outcome of the Iran war to whether there will be a hantavirus pandemic in 2026.
Rather than betting against the company, as in a traditional sportsbook, users buy “shares” in real-world events with digital currency pegged to the US dollar or direct cash deposits. These sites do not operate in the UK but have taken the US by storm. They can play in states that the likes of Flutter cannot because they are not technically considered gambling operators.
Jackson is not giving up on the USCARLOTTA CARDONA/GETTY IMAGES
This means that they don’t have to pay gambling taxes or for state licences. Prediction markets are licensed by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission instead of individual states. Several states have filed civil suits against prediction markets, arguing that they are, in effect, operating unlicensed gambling operations.
Flutter has launched its own prediction betting app under the FanDuel brand, called FanDuel Predicts. But this too will cost huge sums to scale: Flutter said this month that it would spend as much as $300 million on marketing and expanding it.
A Flutter spokesman said there was “no evidence of meaningful cannibalisation of the core sportsbook”, and that prediction markets “remain an early stage, incremental opportunity that allows us to reach the 50 per cent of the population who do not currently have access to a FanDuel product”.
Meanwhile, a cultural backlash against gambling is brewing. Almost half of Americans polled by Ipsos last year said they believed sports betting ads should be banned during games, rising to 51 per cent among sports fans.
Experts from around the world met in Boston, Massachusetts, last month to call for more regulation. At the helm was Richard Daynard, a professor of law who is widely credited with leading the fight against “Big Tobacco” for decades.
States are taking action, too, such as Colorado, where legislators have approved a bill limiting customers to six deposits over a 24-hour period, while banning credit card deposits altogether, prohibiting betting firms from sending push notifications to people’s phones, and clamping down on adverts.
Still, Flutter isn’t giving up on the US. Earlier this month, the company said it may fully delist from the London Stock Exchange in favour of retaining a sole listing in New York — despite Jackson’s previous claims that the firm intended to keep its secondary listing in Britain.
It has kicked off a “sportsbook improvement plan”, which the Flutter spokesman said would be “focused on more selective generosity, a stronger loyalty proposition and continued product innovation”. And while recent months have proved trying, the company’s US business is still highly profitable.
But reassuring its wounded investors won’t be easy. With pressure mounting, Jackson will be hoping the odds fall in his favour once more.