Yet more change could be coming to the regional sports networks once owned and branded by Fox Sports.
Main Street Sports Group, owner of the FanDuel-branded regional sports networks, is in “advanced talks” to sell a majority stake in itself to DAZN, Lauren Thomas of The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Under the deal, which per Thomas could be announced as early as next month, DAZN could make a “sizable cash investment” in Main Street and integrate the FanDuel Sports Network app with its existing streaming platform.
The news comes nearly two years after Amazon initially announced plans to invest in the RSN business, then known as Diamond Sports Group. That investment would have been $115 million, but Amazon pulled the offer within months amid uncertainty over the future of the RSNs, which were still in bankruptcy proceedings at the time. Main Street has since exited bankruptcy.
DAZN does not carry anywhere near the profile of Amazon, but it is a major player in sports broadcasting outside of the United States. The company, which was briefly run by ex-ESPN president John Skipper, has thus far operated on the outskirts of the domestic sports media scene — with this past year’s FIFA Club World Cup arguably the highest-profile programming that it has carried on U.S. television. An acquisition of the nation’s largest RSN owner would obviously change that significantly.
The FanDuel Sports Network RSNs, previously known under the banner of Bally Sports, have been on uncertain ground ever since they were sold by 21st Century Fox in 2017. Initially, the then-Fox Sports-branded RSNs were sold to Disney as part of that company’s $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox assets. But government regulators forced Disney to divest the networks, with Sinclair winning a fairly lukewarm auction for a price less than half of the networks’ initial value.
The RSNs quickly accumulated billions in debt, and Sinclair was forced by creditors to set up an independent board of directors that eventually became Diamond Sports Group (renamed Main Street Sports Group earlier this year). Diamond went into a nearly two-year bankruptcy proceeding in which it ceded or lost rights to several teams and shut down a handful of its networks. It currently owns rights to 29 teams between the NBA, NHL and MLB across 16 networks, compared to 42 teams across 21 networks before the bankruptcy.
