Every explanation offered so far for Flutter Entertainment's rocky year points squarely at prediction markets. Kalshi, Polymarket, PrizePicks, Underdog: the usual suspects, all present and correct in the post-mortems following news that Dan Taylor will replace Peter Jackson as Group CEO from 1 October.
It's a tidy story. And Wall Street loves a clean villain. But it isn't the whole story…
Rewind 12 months and a very different narrative surfaces, one unrelated to event contracts and everything to do with a country of 1.4 billion people abruptly deciding that skill-based real-money gaming, a category Indian courts had protected for 70 years, would simply cease to exist.
That's India. And, remarkably, almost nobody is talking about it.
SEE ALSO: The moment Flutter announced Taylor would succeed Jackson as CEO
India's online gaming ban: The August that broke things
On 22 August 2025, India's Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill received presidential assent. Just two days after being introduced to Parliament and, without any industry consultation, it obliterated overnight.
Flutter's Junglee Games, a rummy and fantasy platform serving roughly 150 million users, had no choice but to switch off its real-money products immediately.
At first, the damage looked containable. Flutter had projected Junglee would deliver around $200m of revenue and $50m of adjusted EBITDA that year; the actual forfeited amount looked closer to $100m and $25m respectively.
Stifel analysts, reiterating a Buy rating and a $356 price target that same week, waved the whole episode off as immaterial, estimating less than a 1% impact on FY25 guidance. Case closed.
Or so it seemed.
When Q3 2025 results landed that November, Flutter disclosed a $556m non-cash impairment tied directly to Junglee: $517m of goodwill, $32m of intangibles and $7m of other long-lived assets, wiped out in a single line. That charge, alongside an unrelated $205m payment to Boyd Gaming over US market access, dragged the group to a net loss of $789m for the quarter, up from just $114m a year earlier.
Full-year guidance was simultaneously cut by $570m of revenue and $380m of adjusted EBITDA. Around 350 jobs were lost in Delhi and Bengaluru, and APAC revenue fell 10% in Q4 as the region absorbed the loss of what had briefly been one of its fastest-growing markets.
It's worth remembering what Flutter had actually built there. Having taken a 50.1% stake in Junglee for around $67m in 2021, Flutter spent the following four years raising that position to 95%, growing total investment to roughly $237m, and hiring more than 1,100 staff.
This wasn't a peripheral bolt-on quietly written down. It was a deliberate, multi-year emerging-markets bet, unwound by legislation that moved from introduction to presidential assent in two days.
Flutter's 52-week share price high, $313.69, was set on 7 August 2025, days before Junglee went dark
Flutter wasn't even the only casualty; Dream11, MPL and Probo were all forced to pull their own real-money products in the same week, wiping out a sector Indian media had pegged at close to $4bn in annual value.
None of that is prediction markets. All of it is India.
SEE ALSO: Flutter's full Q2 report, as profits slide and the FY outlook is cut
Regulatory uncertainty: A wound that won't close
What makes India the underrated story isn't just the size of that initial hit, it's that the wound never really closed.
In May 2026, India's Supreme Court upheld a sweeping 28% GST on the full face value of online gaming bets, alongside state-level bans in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, hardening the legal ground beneath the industry's exclusion. Bihar passed its own gambling prohibition in July, complete with warrantless search powers. And as of today, the Supreme Court has agreed to hold a final hearing on constitutional challenges to the underlying Act itself, meaning the single biggest regulatory shock in Flutter's recent history remains, over a year on, unresolved in the courts.
Line that up against the calendar and the coincidences pile up uncomfortably. Flutter's 52-week share price high, $313.69, was set on 7 August 2025, days before Junglee went dark. The stock closed at $92.91 on 5 August this year, down more than two-thirds from that peak, after tumbling over 11% on results day alone.
Amy Howe was pushed out as FanDuel CEO in May 2026. Jackson's own exit followed in August. None of this proves India caused the executive reshuffle; correlation isn't causation and boards rarely explain these decisions in full. But it is a striking amount of turbulence to leave entirely out of the narrative, especially when a business writes off a nine-figure chunk of value in a market where its flagship product can no longer legally operate.
The rest of the story, fairly told
To be clear, prediction markets remain a real and growing threat – still Flutter's biggest strategic headache. Bank of America pegged prediction-market volume at roughly $10bn in June, noting that the share of DraftKings customers also using Kalshi rose to 9.5%, up from just 4% in January.
The bank's own EBITDA estimate for FanDuel, at $634m, sits well below Flutter's roughly $970m guidance. Flutter's FanDuel Predicts, meanwhile, has generated just $15m in revenue year-to-date against a $50m full-year target.
Kalshi, for its part, is being sued by New York for $36bn, hardly the sign of a settled regulatory environment on that front either. It also just lost a case, predictably, in Utah.
Add in the LSE delisting, rising UK and European taxes, a heavy US investment cycle squeezing FanDuel's margins, and a Q2 2026 swing to a $296m net loss despite revenue growth, and there's more than enough turbulence to explain Flutter's year without mentioning India at all.
But "more than enough" isn't the same as "the whole story."
SEE ALSO: Five ways Jackson reshaped Flutter
What Taylor actually inherits
With all this in mind, Dan Taylor doesn't just inherit a prediction-markets arms race. He inherits a company that took a nine-figure regulatory blindside in one of its highest-growth markets, is still fighting that battle through India's courts, and has watched its valuation collapse across largely the same window.
Kalshi makes for the punchier headline, while Flutter may also have a court case to fight over FanDuel's valuation with its Co-Founders to come...
But, while no one is dismissing the battle against prediction markets, India may be the more expensive story that has been quietly missed here.
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Flutter's Junglee business was a genuine emerging markets bet, not a minor sideline: the group raised its stake from 50.1% to 95% over four years, taking total investment to roughly $237m, before India's snap legislation wiped the position out in a single week
