A pair of derivatives traders from Sydney want you to short the Blackhawks. The CME just handed them the keys.
CHICAGO, IL (JLN) — September 3, 2026: On a hazy afternoon in a South Loop conference room, a group of Rhodes19 sailboats on Lake Michigan drifted past the windows like ticks on a slow market tape. Inside, seated side by side, were two Australians interviewed on video by John Lothian News, with the patience of men who have done this a hundred times, about why a hat trick should have a price.
Leigh Taylforth and Rhett Dinsdale are the co-founders of FutureSports, a Chicago-by-way-of-Sydney startup that has spent four years convincing skeptical league executives, a very interested CME Group, and a somewhat bewildered Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the box score is, in fact, a part of a futures contract waiting to happen. On Sept. 28, pending regulatory review, the CME will begin trading the world’s first NHL team futures, tied to indexes the two men built one scarce statistic at a time. The puck drops the next night. The following evening, Taylforth and Dinsdale fly to Houston for the HOOD Summit, as in Robinhood, because when you are trying to turn hockey into a hedge, sleep is a luxury good.
The pitch, delivered with the unfailing courtesy of two Australian traders who have repeated it in a lot of rooms, is that sports is now a real asset class. Franchises trade hands for billions. Media rights deals keep breaking records. Whole neighborhoods are being poured around stadiums. The two love going to Wrigley Field and its neighborhood and burgeoning Ricketts family-developed complex to watch the Chicago Cubs. Somewhere in that pile of capital, Taylforth argues, is a corporate treasurer who would very much like to hedge his exposure to a losing season.
“We’re looking to create something that we think helps sports,” Taylforth said, in the tone of a man who has been asked, more than once, whether he is helping sports. “It grows the pie. It enables participants that have capital at risk in sports to be able to manage their balance sheets.”
The leagues, he allowed, needed some coaching for this novel product. They knew sports betting. They did not know indexes. They did not know derivatives. They did not know what it meant to trade an exchange-listed contract on a team’s performance without anyone gambling on the outcome. So the Australians did what Australians in Chicago do. They booked meetings. They used their contacts to get more contacts and more meetings.
The first was with the NBA, in 2022. The NBA introduced them to Major League Baseball. Baseball introduced them to somebody else. FutureSports began the way a lot of Chicago companies begin, with two guys, a slide deck, and a growing address book.
Until then, they had run the operation from Sydney, taking red-eye flights to Chicago at the request of leagues that wanted to keep talking. Three and a half years ago, Dinsdale said, they gave up and moved. They dissolved the Australian entity, incorporated in the United States, and set about the strange business of turning a slap shot into a data point of an index.
The methodology, published on the company’s website for anyone who cares to look, is a careful piece of financial engineering dressed up in hockey pads, baseball catcher’s equipment and basketballs. FutureSports goes back through 20 years of league data and asks a very old commodities question: how scarce is this? A hat trick is scarce. A clean sheet, or shutout in American-speak, is scarce. Fifty saves in a hockey game is very scarce. Hitting for the cycle is very scarce. The scarcer the event, the more it moves the index, in either direction. Roughly four dozen constituents feed the NHL index. Baseball, when it arrives, will have more than 65.
“We look at scarcity first,” Dinsdale said. He might have been describing wheat.
Each of the 32 NHL team indexes opens at 7,500 points and moves in real time, tick by tick, on play-by-play data piped in through CME. Standard contracts are worth $10 per index point. Micro contracts, sized for the retail crowd, are one-tenth of that. Notional value at the open is about $75,000 for the big one and about $750 for the small one. Trading, in keeping with the CME’s cheerful indifference to bedtime, runs around the clock.
Then there is the matter of the scorekeeper. For all the machine learning, backtesting, and index calculation engines, the whole edifice ultimately rests on a middle-aged man in the press box with a keyboard.
“Official scoring as denominated by the league,” Dinsdale said. “Whatever the official scorer pushes, if it was a hit or an assist, that’s the data that we use.”
“So humans,” Taylforth added. “You might have a caller and a person who is pushing the buttons. Old school.”
This raises the question every derivatives lawyer eventually asks: what happens when the scorer changes his mind? Anyone who has watched a baseball game knows that a hit in the top of the third inning can quietly become an error by the bottom of the third, and that hit can downgrade other statistics like runs batted in. FutureSports has thought about this too. Because the indexes are broad, no single stat adjustment triggers a restatement. The correction is simply pushed out to the market as its own tiny constituent, nudging the price by a fraction. In testing, Dinsdale said, the effect was de minimis, a word that comes up often when Australians discuss American sports.
The CME did not walk into this blind. Taylforth met the exchange’s ventures team at an FIA event in Chicago. Talks turned into an equity check, a board seat for Tim McCourt, and the kind of validation a two-man startup dreams about. Robinhood is also on the cap table, which explains the micro contract and the emphasis on retail. DRW and parties related to the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers are on the cap table too. Institutions, the founders concede, will be a slower conversion, the kind that involves risk committees, education modules, and years of trial data agreements with leagues who are still working out how they feel about the whole enterprise.
The founders are careful to distinguish what they are building from what most Americans think they are building. This is not a sportsbook. There is no line, no spread, no over/under. There is a price, and it moves when the puck moves, the no-hitter is pitched, or the 3-pointer is hit; at the end of the month, it either settled higher than you bought it or it did not.
Whether the American derivatives customer, weaned on Treasury futures and crude oil, wants to wake up short the Toronto Maple Leafs is the question the market will answer beginning Sept. 28.
By the end of the interview, the sailboats had moved on. The sun was high in the sky. Taylforth and Dinsdale were getting ready to go to the airport for another long flight. In a few weeks, the NHL season will start, and two Australians will be back in Chicago to find out whether America was ready to trade its box scores like E-Mini S&Ps.
Old school, indeed.
