Almost every insurance policy ever written pays out when something goes wrong. Game Point Capital writes policies that pay out when a team wins.
Will Hall and his brother Jack started it with no experience in insurance and nobody they knew in sport. Ten years on it's an MGA writing contractual bonus, coach buyout and NIL cover — and in 2024 it paid the University of Connecticut $2.77m after the men repeated as national champions and the women reached the Final Four. On how you price a bonus when there's no loss history to price it from, how you hedge a $54m coach buyout without handing the buyer the trigger, and why the cheapest place to lay off a sports risk right now might be a prediction market rather than a reinsurer.
Guest: Will Hall, co-founder and CEO of Game Point Capital.
Chapters
- 00:06 — Introduction
- 00:44 — Insurance that pays out when you win
- 01:37 — "You kick in when something goes right"
- 01:57 — A nine-billion-dollar market, and the liability nobody funds
- 02:32 — Two brothers, and a text message about Grigor Dimitrov
- 03:53 — "We were probably dumb"
- 04:19 — Lloyd's coverholder to MGA, and the friend from kindergarten
- 04:50 — Pricing a bonus with no loss triangle
- 05:40 — Why every quote has a shelf life
- 06:19 — UConn 2024: $5.6m of bonuses triggered, $2.77m paid
- 07:45 — $228m of buyout money in a single coaching carousel
- 09:12 — Hedging a buyout without creating a moral hazard
- 10:48 — Limits: "we haven't signed a hundred-million-dollar risk policy"
- 11:04 — NIL, the House settlement, and a $48.8m hard cap
- 12:08 — "You're gonna get sued again and again"
- 13:15 — Coaches are CEOs, paid the opposite way round
- 13:55 — Kalshi, and hedging at roughly half price
- 15:39 — Where the discount comes from, and where it doesn't
- 17:23 — Venue risk: the unresolved legal status of event contracts
- 18:19 — "You're rounding — it's like zero percent is hedged"
- 19:09 — The next Covid, and the wrong takeaway from the last one
- 20:27 — One per cent
Links
- Game Point Capital
- Kalshi / Game Point Capital partnership and pricing figures, February 2026
- "UConn insured basketball coach bonuses and saved nearly $3M," Stamford Advocate, April 2024
- 2025 coaching carousel buyout tracking, Yahoo Sports
- Protect College Sports Act of 2026, Senate Commerce section-by-section summary
Follow the Fortunes covers the risk behind the return in sport. Hosted by Phil Schmidt.
Views expressed by guests are their own. Nothing here is insurance, investment or legal advice.