Week 1 PF Sports Round Up: The $376.7M Week on Sports Prediction Markets
Prediction Frontier rebuilt the week of Sept. 14-20, 2026 from the trade record itself. Every taker fill on Polymarket's Polygon exchange was pulled through Dune, then classified by sport and cut by day, hour, wallet, and ticket size. Sports traded $299.3M across 2.32M trades and 37,608 wallets. Esports, counted separately, added $77.4M. Together, that is 69% of everything the exchange traded in the week. Soccer took 46% of the sports total and had more wallets than any other sport on all seven days, which matters now that the FIFA window has removed the top European leagues until Oct. 10. The NFL arrived at full size: its Week 2 Sunday slate traded $63.2M against $16.8M in Week 1. And the two largest tickets of the week were not bets. They were exits, sold at 99.9c by wallets that had bought before kickoff. The report runs 22 pages and 27 charts, covers every league that traded, compares Polymarket against Kalshi on price and depth, and closes with one falsifiable market call per sport for Sept. 21-27.
Sports and esports traded $376.7M on Polymarket's order book this week, measured trade by trade on-chain. That is 69% of everything that changed hands on the exchange. Sports alone took $299.3M from 37,608 wallets, and esports added $77.4M from 13,070. Two things happened at once: soccer supplied between $14.8M and $27.0M every single day, and the NFL arrived at full size, with its Week 2 Sunday slate trading 3.8 times what Week 1's did.
1. Soccer carries the market, and it is about to go quiet.
Soccer traded $137.6M, 46% of all sports volume, and had more wallets than any other sport on all seven days. The FIFA window that opens today takes the top European leagues off the board for two weekends. The four international breaks of the past year cut soccer volume by 34% to 62% (sections 7 and 11).
2. The NFL is the largest-ticket market in sports.
It traded $59.7M in the window, 64% of it on Sunday, and 69% of its money arrived in single tickets of $5,000 or more, against 37% for soccer and under 30% for tennis and esports (sections 5 and 7).
3. The biggest tickets of the week were exits.
The two largest single trades, $4.85M on the Chiefs and $3.27M on Betis, were sales at 99.9c by wallets that had bought before kickoff. A fifth of soccer volume and a quarter of esports volume traded at 97c or above, so headline volume overstates how much genuine price risk changed hands (sections 5 and 6).
4. Every sport runs on its own clock.
Esports did 52% of its volume before 10am ET and tennis 42%. MLB did 58% after 6pm and UFC 81%. Depth in any given market depends as much on the hour as on the sport (section 4).
5. Esports has the most loyal and least concentrated crowd.
40% of esports wallets traded nothing else, the median wallet spent $124, and the ten largest wallets held 16% of volume, against 41% to 42% in soccer and the NFL (section 5).
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