The era of an ESPN-branded sportsbook is over, but not the era of gambling content on ESPN.
In a pair of announcements early Thursday, ESPN said that its two-year old partnership with PENN Entertainment will end ahead of schedule on December 1, and that a new partnership with DraftKings will begin that same day.
The ESPN-PENN agreement, which was reached just over two years ago in August 2023, allowed PENN to use the ESPN brand on its pre-existing sportsbook for ten years. The result was the creation of ESPN BET, which launched in November of that year and has since become a prominent element of ESPN programming via advertisements featuring ESPN personalities, in-game integrations and sponsorships, and daily listings of odds on ESPN.com and in on-screen graphics.
But ESPN BET never seemed to take off, and the existence of an ESPN-branded sportsbook became somewhat of a liability last month when NBA coach Chauncey Billups and player Terry Rozier were arrested as part of separate gambling investigations. During a segment on “Get Up” covering breaking news of the arrests, ESPN removed its BottomLine, which was displaying an ad for the ESPN BET service.
The DraftKings deal will allow ESPN to remain heavily involved in gambling without putting its name on the operation. DraftKings will become the official sportsbook and odds provider of ESPN, and ESPN BET will exist only as a “sports betting content brand” seen on television (“ESPN BET Live” will continue), social and digital channels.
There has been much discussion about the increasing role of gambling in sports and society, particularly since the arrests of Billups, Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones last month. And while the end of ESPN BET is certainly a notable step in that context, there are no signs that the proliferation of gambling content in sports media is slowing anytime soon.
It was not too long ago that mentions of gambling on sports television were delivered almost in code, and any discussion of the odds in on-screen graphics avoided any direct use of team or league names (for example, referring to the “Pro Football Championship” matchup of “Baltimore vs. San Francisco”). But since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down a 1992 law that banned states from authorizing sports gambling, legal sports betting has made gambling content almost inescapable during game telecasts.
