Earlier this month, ESPN and Penn Gaming announced they would mutually end their ESPN Bet partnership in Year 2 of a 10-year, $1.5 billion agreement. Shortly after, ESPN announced it had already struck a new deal with another sportsbook operator, DraftKings.
DraftKings, of course, is one half of a practical duopoly in the sports betting space alongside FanDuel. Combined, the two sides control about 70% of the market for sports betting in the United States. ESPN Bet, on the other hand, controlled just 5% of the market two years after Penn teamed up with the Worldwide Leader. The relationship wasn’t working for either side, so both decided to get out early.
Prior to its deal with Penn, ESPN hadn’t seriously embraced the sports betting craze. By the time it jumped in, the network was too little too late. The market had already matured, and DraftKings and FanDuel had solidified themselves as top dogs.
But those two years might prove valuable for ESPN from an infrastructure perspective. ESPN hopes to capitalize on DraftKings’ scale in a manner that simply wasn’t possible with Penn. And the network already has all the pieces in place to make this a plug-and-play operation.
In an interview with Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports, ESPN VP of Betting and Fantasy Mike Morrison said that even DraftKings co-founder and CEO Jason Robins was surprised by the efforts ESPN had already made in the gambling space prior to signing the new partnership.
“If I look at our efforts over the last several years, and certainly the last two, we began to really get all of the company—on the content side, the product side, technology, marketing, responsible gaming, sales—really aligned that this betting initiative is a really big thing,” Morrison told FOS. “We began to pull a lot of resources in the company and effort around storytelling and framing in ways that we hadn’t yet done… I think Jason and DraftKings saw that, and by their own admission, they were both impressed and at times surprised. They said, ‘We didn’t think you would develop everything that you did.'”
If DraftKings was genuinely surprised at ESPN’s betting machine before their partnership, one can only imagine what it will look like once the two sides establish themselves with each other. ESPN certainly hasn’t had any aversion to embracing gambling content during its most popular studio programming. And when asked whether the network’s top talents would appear in commercials for DraftKings, similar to how Stephen A. Smith and Mike Greenberg were spokespeople for ESPN Bet, Morrison said DraftKings is “very interested.”
The partnership officially begins on Dec. 1, at which point we’ll get our first look at how the ESPN-DraftKings marriage will look in practice.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.