Live event contracts on the ball: Leagues Cup and MLS markets open August 4

Our data partnership with Stats Perform now extends into Major League Soccer. From August 4, Leagues Cup and MLS regular season matches carry a live grid of event contracts on the run of play: zone-level positions, priced pari-mutuel, resolved in seconds while the match is still going.

The contract

The pitch is partitioned into zones. Each zone is a separate binary contract on a single question: does the ball arrive here next. You take a position, the ball moves, and the contract resolves. Hold time is measured in seconds, so a ninety minute match is a few hundred discrete resolutions rather than one.

Pricing is pari-mutuel. Each zone carries a live decimal multiplier that moves with the pool, so a contested central zone might sit at 2.10 while a switch to the far touchline prices at 4.86. The multiplier is the market's read on that zone at that instant. Your edge is the gap between that number and your own read of the phase of play.

Adjacent zones combine into one combo position, so a read on how a phase develops gets expressed as a single order rather than several. Participants trade against one another in a shared pool, and Markets.Futbol operates the market rather than taking a position in it.

Two competitions, one live board

We soft launched across the 2026 FIFA World Cup and ran live again through MLS All-Star week. Those windows proved the market resolves accurately at scale under live conditions, through a final.

Leagues Cup runs August 4 to the final on September 6, putting MLS clubs against Liga MX clubs. The MLS regular season runs alongside it and continues to Decision Day on November 7, followed by the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs. Leagues Cup knockouts sit midweek, so the two competitions interleave rather than collide. For anyone building a repeatable process, that is a season of reps rather than a tournament sprint: the same market structure every matchday, and enough volume to learn where your read is actually sharp.

Latency is the product

Zone-level contracts resolving in seconds are only viable when the underlying match data arrives in a fraction of a second and is correct on every settlement. A feed that is approximately right, or right a beat late, breaks the market rather than degrading it.

That is the Stats Perform partnership. Their low-latency Opta feeds supply both the speed real-time trading requires and the accuracy that contract creation, resolution, and settlement depend on. It is the same data infrastructure the professional sports data industry runs on, pointed at a market that settles continuously.

Where the edge comes from

This rewards live reading rather than pre-match research. What moves a position is possession, shape, where the ball has already been, which side is building and which is sitting deep, and how a keeper distributes under pressure. Fans who watch closely already run this model informally. Here it prices out, in public, several times a minute.

If you have traded event contracts before, the structure will feel familiar: short-dated binaries, pool-based pricing, continuous resolution. The novelty is the underlying, which is the run of play itself rather than a scoreline.

Access

Markets.Futbol is invite-only, and we are extending access to the waitlist ahead of a broader rollout. Join now to request access for Leagues Cup and the MLS season.

Journalists and partner teams: the full announcement, media assets, and contact details are on our press page.