In mid-August, Bears president Kevin Warren stood at Halas Hall and said the quiet part into a microphone: "our sole focus at this point in time is working on a world-class stadium and mixed-use development in Hammond, Indiana." Then, in comments reported August 28, the most powerful man in the league leaned the other way. At league meetings, commissioner Roger Goodell said "we want to make sure that Arlington Heights and Illinois have an opportunity as well as Indiana to put their best foot forward," adding there is no specific timetable, and Governor J.B. Pritzker confirmed he and Goodell had spoken. Kalshi's crowd heard it. The "new location in Illinois" contract closed that Friday session at 58 cents on its biggest volume since the press conference itself, then gave most of it back the next day. As of early August 30 Illinois sits at 53 cents against Indiana's 43, and the market has spent two straight weeks pricing the microphone over the money. Our price-blind, five-model AI panel read the same public record and refuses to follow: its favorite has not changed, its number has not moved, and the gap between the crowd and the models on this board is now wider than at any point since this page first went up. The full board, seat by seat, is below, and the most interesting price on it is not either state. We will get to that one.
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The Market At A Glance
| Venue | Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state, as of August 2026) |
| The Event | "Where will the Chicago Pro Football Team relocate?" (Kalshi event KXRELOCATIONCHI-28), four mutually exclusive yes/no contracts: a new location in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or do not relocate/announce |
| The Contract | A location resolves YES if the team relocates OR officially announces a relocation to that location by the first game of the 2028 season. It can resolve YES even if the team still plays 2028 home games at its current stadium |
| Window | Kalshi's listed expected expiration is September 7, 2028, roughly the first game of the 2028 regular season, and under the listed rules a location market closes early once the team relocates |
| Prices Below As Of | August 30, 2026, 05:00 UTC (about 1 a.m. ET). Each price is the bid/ask midpoint. The panel scored the board August 14; prices on this page refresh during any stadium-news wave |
The row that shapes every price on this page is the contract one. This market settles on an official announcement, not a moving truck: the Bears can play every 2028 home game at Soldier Field and Indiana still resolves YES if the team has formally committed to Hammond. Our explainer on how Kalshi settlement works covers why the exact wording outranks the headline. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice; every number here gets graded in public once the market settles, in the full graded Model Verdict scoreboard.
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One Track Has The Money, One Has The Microphone
Strip the quotes away and the two tracks are not symmetrical. The Indiana track has hard machinery behind it. In February 2026, Indiana enacted Senate Bill 27, creating a Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority and designating Hammond, about 28 miles from Chicago, as the site; Governor Mike Braun signed the funding measure. On June 5, 2026, the Bears' board voted to advance the Hammond project. As of the August 13 press conference, the team had finished reviewing the "Lost Marsh" site, was running geological and environmental due diligence on a second site called "Wolf Lake Terminal," and might merge the two. Warren tied the final decision to land viability and financing coming together, and gave no date. That is a project moving toward a decision, with a board vote and a state financing framework already in place.
The Indiana money is not settled politics, either. The financing plan leans on a 12% admissions tax, a doubled Lake County hotel tax and a new food-and-beverage levy, and the backlash is already collecting careers: Porter County's council president lost his Republican primary this summer after backing the stadium taxes, with local support for the package openly splitting (Indiana Capital Chronicle). Illinois has its own version of the fight — taxpayer groups organized against Springfield's stadium bill within weeks of its filing (Shaw Local). A market pricing where the Bears play is partly pricing whether either state's public-money coalition holds through an election cycle.
The Illinois track owns land and little else. The Bears bought the 326-acre Arlington Park site in a deal that closed in February 2023 for $197.2 million, and chairman George McCaskey still name-checks it: "We will be the Chicago Bears whether we're in Arlington or whether we're in Hammond." But the enclosed-stadium plan has been stalled for years on roughly $826 million in public infrastructure funding and an unresolved property-tax freeze. Springfield keeps producing proposals that do not become law: an April megaprojects bill, a June stadium-authority bill the House never voted on, a June plan from Rep. Martin McLaughlin pairing a $2.5 billion team investment with $1.2 billion in state money. Pritzker has said he would call a special session if lawmakers brought him a deal. None have. And the August 13 press conference added the detail the market keeps skipping: both Warren and McCaskey described the team's recent contact with Illinois officials as "minimal," and Pritzker noted the Bears still had not put in writing what they want from the state.
So what did Goodell's August 28 comment actually add? Not money, not a bill, not a written ask. A commissioner keeping a second bidder warm is standard league practice; it costs nothing and preserves leverage for the eventual owner vote. Pritzker himself described Goodell as neutral on location. The comment is real, it is sourced, and it is the best headline the Illinois track has produced all month. It is also the kind of fact that moves a price without moving a probability. Hold that thought, because the tape shows exactly what it did.
What The Tape Did With Goodell's Nudge
The crowd's whole August, in six sessions of closing prices:
| Kalshi Close (Cents), By Session | Indiana | Illinois |
|---|---|---|
| Thu Aug 13 (Press-Conference Day) | 59 | 46 |
| Fri Aug 14 (The Slide) | 43 | 51 |
| Mon Aug 17 | 51 | 39 |
| Thu Aug 27 | 45 | 54 |
| Fri Aug 28 (Goodell) | 42 | 58 |
| Sat Aug 29 | 47 | 49 |
Read the last three rows as one move. On the Friday Goodell's comments landed, Illinois closed at 58 on about 3,500 contracts, its biggest single session since the press conference on the 13th; Indiana closed at 42 on about 2,200. By Saturday's close the whole pop had retraced, Illinois back to 49, Indiana back to 47, and the two legs were a coin flip again. Sunday's early book has Illinois at a 53-cent midpoint and Indiana at 43. That is not a market absorbing new information; that is a market chasing a headline and thinking better of it overnight. Saturday's 49-cent close sat five cents under the Thursday close that preceded Goodell's comments, and this morning's 53-cent midpoint, quoted on a six-cent spread, is still a cent under it.
The structure under those prices matters as much as the prices. Indiana is the tight leg: a two-cent spread, 42 bid, 44 ask. Illinois is quoted 50 bid, 56 ask, a six-cent spread with all of ten contracts at the best bid, and in the ten days before Goodell spoke its session volume fell under 50 contracts three times. Because that spread is so wide, the four midpoints currently sum to 101.5, not 100; the board's nominal leader is partly an artifact of its own thin book. This has been the pattern since August 14, when Indiana fell from 51 to 43 in a single mid-day hour on about 800 contracts with no public development attached, a slide we dug through the record trying to explain and could only pin to Warren's hedge from the previous afternoon, that he would not fully rule out Illinois. The crowd repriced Hammond down by a quarter that week and never settled on where the probability went. The thin Illinois leg absorbed it by default, and Goodell's comment briefly turned the default into a rally.
A favorite made of ten-contract bids is a weak thing to build a story on. Which is exactly why the panel's read, produced without seeing a single one of these prices, is worth putting next to the board.
The Board
Every seat scored the four outcomes price-blind on August 14: no model saw a Kalshi number before committing to its own, each read the same fetched, dated fact card, scored the field as one distribution, then revised once after reading the others' anonymized reasoning. Our standard panel is eight models; five returned verdicts this cycle, and the blend is their equal-weight mean. The market column carries the August 30 midpoints, so the gaps are current. Sorted by how far the blend sits from the price; a negative edge means the panel thinks the crowd is too high.
| Outcome | Market (mid) | AI blend | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| A New Location In Illinois | 53.0¢ | 16% | −37 |
| Indiana (Hammond) | 43.0¢ | 62% | +19 |
| No Move Announced By 2028 | 5.0¢ | 20% | +15 |
| Iowa | 0.5¢ | 1% | +0.5 |
The top row is the widest this page's market-versus-model gap has ever been. The crowd has Arlington Heights as a 53-cent favorite; the panel, reading the same record you just did, has it at 16, a 37-point disagreement that was 34 when this page went up. It widened this week because the price moved and the facts did not. The Iowa row is a formality, no bid and a one-cent ask, a midpoint with nothing behind it.
| Outcome | Opus | Sonnet | GLM | Kimi | DeepSeek | Blend | Market |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Indiana | 63 | 62 | 61 | 62 | 64 | 62% | 43.0¢ |
| A New Location In Illinois | 16 | 16 | 18 | 16 | 15 | 16% | 53.0¢ |
| Do Not Relocate Or Announce | 20 | 21 | 20 | 21 | 20 | 20% | 5.0¢ |
| Iowa | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1% | 0.5¢ |
What stands out in the seat table is how little the seats argue. Five independent models land within three points of each other on every leg, and the revision round mostly pulled the outliers inward. The seat that opened highest on Illinois walked itself back after weighing a late Springfield revival against the record: "Illinois stays alive because the Bears own 326 acres, McCaskey still names Arlington, and Springfield is countering ... but repeated funding failure and the board's Hammond vote make a decisive pivot the underdog," was Kimi's landing spot. A tight price-blind cluster is not proof, but it means the disagreement with the crowd is not one model's quirk.
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Opus 84% on 849 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 824 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,564 graded calls · Kimi 82% on 2,550 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,603 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.
More live boards from the same panel: NFL Win Totals 2026 (the Bears' own "9+ wins" contract trades near 60¢) · Super Bowl 2027 Odds (Chicago to win it all sits near 3.5¢). Prices fetched August 30, 2026.
The Quiet Leg The Crowd Keeps Underpricing
That promise from the top of the page: the most interesting price on this board is the 5-cent one. For "do not relocate or announce" to resolve YES, the saga has to stay formally unresolved for two more years despite a board-approved Indiana project. Unlikely, which is why nobody prices it as the favorite. But the panel puts it at roughly one-in-five, four times the market, and the case is built from the same due-diligence record everything else on this page comes from. Wolf Lake Terminal is still under geological and environmental testing. A possible merger of two sites complicates the capital stack. Warren has now tied the decision to financing as well as land. The Soldier Field lease runs through 2033, with an early-exit option the team can invoke but no obligation to, so no deadline forces anyone's hand. Goodell's "no specific timetable" line cuts this direction too: the one man who could hurry the process just said out loud that he will not.
And someone in this market already agrees. On the evening of August 17, blocks of 200 to 800 contracts bought this leg at 6 to 9 cents, the only conviction-sized buying the board's thin legs have seen since the press conference. The contract went from a penny at the August 13 close to as high as 8 cents by mid-month, has closed in the 3-to-5 range since, and sits at a 5-cent midpoint this morning. Whoever bought those blocks did not need a model panel to conclude a two-year stall was worth more than 2 percent. The market that is roughly 95 percent sure something gets announced, and splits that near-certainty between two states, is the exact shape the panel pushes back on.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
The blend re-scores on facts, not price moves, which is why a 15-point slide and a Goodell headline have left it exactly where August 14 put it. Each of these is a concrete, checkable event that would move it:
- A Formal Bears Announcement Naming Hammond. Under the rules this is the resolution trigger itself: Indiana settles YES, everything else NO. The single most likely mover.
- A Final Indiana Site Pick. Lost Marsh, Wolf Lake Terminal, or a merger; a committed site is the last step before an announcement and pushes "do nothing" down with it.
- A Written Bears Ask To Illinois, Or A Special Session That Delivers The Money. The first would be news on its own given the "minimal" contact both executives described; the second, covering the roughly $826 million and the tax freeze, is the one event that could make the crowd's 53 cents look cheap instead of rich.
- A Stall Past Mid-2027 With No Site Decision. Every month of due diligence the window shrinks, the more the 5-cent leg earns.
| Settles | By the first game of the 2028 regular season (Kalshi expected expiration September 7, 2028) |
| Early Close | A location market closes early once the team relocates |
| Re-Scored | Panel scored August 14, 2026; prices refreshed August 30, 2026 |
The early-close line is worth a second look because it is the reason this market can end abruptly: one press release from Halas Hall and the whole four-leg board resolves, no waiting for 2028. If a two-year settlement window is too long to hold, the same market-versus-model framework runs on the panel's Kalshi NFL picks, where a depth-chart change grades the call in days, and our free daily picks cover this weekend's card.
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September Is The Tell
The next month is unusually easy to grade, because each track has exactly one checkable item. For Indiana, it is the Wolf Lake Terminal due diligence: test results, or a decision on merging the site with Lost Marsh, would be the first hard fact since the June 5 board vote, and in a market that settles on an announcement rather than a move, a committed site puts the 43-cent contract one press release from a dollar. For Illinois, it is a document: a written Bears ask to Springfield, the thing Pritzker says has never existed. Until that paper shows up, Goodell's invitation is leverage, not progress. And if September produces neither, the nickel leg quietly banks another month of its one-in-five case. All August, the crowd traded quotes. September gets to trade facts, and this page will re-price the moment it does.
Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.
