Messi, Mbappé and Haaland Power a World Cup Betting Boom — and Millions in Payouts

The 2026 World Cup group stage has set off a betting frenzy, with Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland at the center of some of the tournament's biggest payouts — turning long-shot goalscorer parlays into life-changing wins.

Sportsbooks felt the hit after all three forwards produced multi-goal games on the same matchday, setting off a wave of successful parlays tied to the tournament's most prolific scorers. Per a bet365 note cited by Covers, the trio have each notched at least two goals in every one of their six combined group games — a treble across all three legs carried +12,000 odds.

One Hard Rock Bet customer turned a $1,578.94 stake into nearly $150,000 when Haaland completed the slip with his second goal against Senegal. Caesars Sportsbook said an Arizona bettor collected $53,270 from a $1,000 wager on the same three. Data from tracking platform Pikkit showed roughly 5,300 users backed Messi, Mbappé and Haaland to each score twice, for combined winnings of about $5.1 million.

Messi's run had already made headlines before the second round of group games. In Argentina's opener against Algeria at Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, the 38-year-old scored a hat trick in a 3-0 win — the first of his World Cup career — which drew him level with Miroslav Klose on 16 goals, the men's tournament record at the time. The performance also came days after prediction market Kalshi announced, on 10 June, a sponsorship deal with the Argentine Football Association that runs for the length of the tournament.

Viral parlays capture attention

One slip stood out above the rest: a three-leg parlay that risked $285 on Messi, Mbappé and Haaland each scoring two or more goals. At odds of +8827, it returned $25,156.59 once all three delivered, and spread across social media the moment Haaland sealed the final leg.

Mbappé was the shortest-priced leg at +170, with Messi and Haaland both listed at +475 for a brace. Analysts noted the bet stacked three genuinely tough outcomes — even elite strikers rarely score twice in a single World Cup match — and warned that high-variance parlays like it are hard to repeat consistently, even as the win drew more recreational punters to multi-leg scorer markets.

A tournament built for record volume

The scale of this summer's action was widely expected. Co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico and running from 11 June to 19 July, the tournament has grown from 32 to 48 teams and 104 matches, roughly 60% more games than the 2022 edition. Analysts at Macquarie put global wagering on the 2022 World Cup at more than $35 billion, or about $500 million per match, and estimated that similar per-game activity would take 2026 past $50 billion. Access has also widened: about 40% of Americans could bet legally in 2022, against roughly 65% by the start of this tournament.

Early data from operators backed that up. DraftKings said a week into the event that its World Cup handle was running five times higher than at the same point four years earlier, and that the USA–Paraguay and Brazil–Morocco matches had been the biggest soccer events in company history by both handle and number of active bettors. Compliance consultancy Gaming Compliance International has projected more than $60 billion in legal, regulated wagering on the tournament worldwide, and close to $600 billion once offshore books and local bookmakers are included.

Massive wagers and prediction-market action

Scorer props weren't the only story. One bettor at Red Rock Resorts staked $777,000 on Argentina to beat Austria; the ticket looked shaky after Messi missed an early penalty, but Argentina's 2-0 win delivered $361,395 in profit and a total payout of $1,138,395.

Prediction markets logged several seven-figure swings. A Polymarket trader risked $2.9 million on Brazil and Haiti finishing under 3.5 goals — Brazil scored three before halftime, then nothing more, for a roughly $3 million profit. Another committed nearly $4.2 million on Türkiye not to win against Paraguay; a 1-0 Türkiye loss produced about $3.71 million.

The losses were just as large. A trader who put $3 million on Belgium to beat Iran was sunk by a scoreless draw, and another lost nearly $1 million when Canada thumped Qatar 6-0. Elsewhere, a Hard Rock Bet customer turned a $50 exact-score parlay into $74,250 by calling wins for Argentina, France and Norway, while a $40 ticket on the Messi-Mbappé-Haaland braces returned $6,544.

Those swings followed an equally dramatic first round. When debutants Cape Verde held Spain to a 0-0 draw in Atlanta on 15 June, a Polymarket user who had put roughly $1 million on a Spanish win at a price implying about 92% probability lost the lot, while a trader known as "fishalive" turned a position of around $428,000 on Spain failing to win into roughly $4.7 million. Across prediction markets, traders had already committed more than $2 billion to tournament-winner contracts before the opening match, and the combined monthly volume reported by Polymarket and Kalshi had climbed from under $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion by April 2026. DraftKings' own prediction product reported an 87% jump in trading volume in the first week, with first-time users tripling and parlay-style "combos" taking a larger share of activity.

Regulators and industry push back

The growth has sharpened a fight over who should police sports trading. On 16 June a coalition including the American Gaming Association, the Indian Gaming Association, the National Congress of American Indians and several unions wrote to US senators asking that the CLARITY Act, a crypto market-structure bill, be used to keep sports wagering outside the remit of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees Kalshi. The AGA has estimated that states have lost around $1 billion in tax revenue to prediction markets since the start of 2025, a figure the platforms dispute.

Pressure is building in Europe too. Gambling regulators from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland issued a joint warning during the tournament that unlicensed prediction platforms lack the betting limits, age checks and other safeguards required of licensed bookmakers, and said they would act against those breaking local rules.

As the group stage rolls on, goalscorer props remain one of the most active markets — and with Messi, Mbappé, Haaland and Kane all chasing the Golden Boot, bettors keep hunting for the next headline-making ticket.