NBA Star Giannis’s Deal With Kalshi Points to the Rot of Sports and Society
Giannis Antetokounmpo made sports feel like something more. Boosting Kalshi, the prediction market, makes it feel like less.
Sports, in a culture overrun by cynicism, can beckon us towards sincerity. It’s where effort is legible and camaraderie is felt. At its best, it’s where grace in defeat, and humility in victory, and shared admiration and respect, and fun, can all exist. It’s where we can push the boundaries of human achievement, or simply awe at our fellow beings who do. In a crisis of carelessness, sports can invite us to care.
And that’s why I’m so disappointed in Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Antetokounmpo recently fired off the news: “Everyone is online. The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own,” the NBA superstar wrote. “Today, I’m joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now.”
Antetokounmpo made the announcement that he’d be joining the prediction market company one day after fans had traded $23 million on his own future, as to whether he would go to another team or stay with the Milwaukee Bucks. Antetokounmpo is one of the most famous athletes in the world, worth tens of millions of dollars, and has the luxury to be able to uplift or be part of anything. Why choose this?
His entry into a market with bets related to his own career smudges the fidelity of sport, and grants legitimacy to markets causing so much harm.
Here is how co-founder Tarek Mansour described the aspiration of Kalshi: “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion.” An apparatus that could “resolve differences of opinions on anything.”