FanDuel Sports Networks are the RSNs that were once branded Bally Sports Networks, and prior to that were part of the Fox Sports Network group. They’ve gone through quite a bit of churn and change over
the last few years as media companies have lurched from linear TV to streaming and several mergers have happened.
That’s the short version of how these channels got to where they are now. And now, per Drew Lerner in Awful Announcing, these channels might have to give up the ghost soon:
According to a report by Tom Friend in Sports Business Journal, the FanDuel Sports Networks are at serious risk of dissolving unless a previously reported sale to sports streaming platform DAZN closes by January. The news comes as Main Street missed a December rights payment to the St. Louis Cardinals. The company’s 29 combined franchises between the NBA, NHL, and MLB are similarly at-risk of missing rights payments in the coming months.
Per Friend, if the DAZN purchase does not close, Main Street will “wind down and dissolve” the FanDuel Sports Networks at the end of this year’s NBA and NHL regular seasons, though the NBA is seemingly preparing for a scenario in which the company could fold in the middle of this season.
This is a big, big deal for the NBA and NHL teams covered by these RSNs, because obviously those teams are in the middle of their seasons. Here, though, we are concerned with the nine MLB teams whose games were on FanDuel Sports Network channels in 2025. This chart shows which channels are scheduled to cover each MLB team’s games in 2026:
As you can see, FanDuel Sports Network covers three of the Cubs’ NL Central rivals. In addition to the Cardinals, as noted above, Brewers and Reds games are also on those channels.
Before I get to what might happen next, a couple of notes on that infographic.
- NESN does have an ownership interest in Sportsnet Pittsburgh, both are owned by the Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Penguins.
- SNY (the Mets channel) and SportsNetLA both are partly owned by Charter Communications, which is why they are listed together. They’re not co-owned and are run separately.
This missed payment is serious business and there is no guarantee that DAZN, a sports streaming platform based in the UK, will complete any purchase of the FanDuel networks.
If they don’t, the rights of the nine teams noted above would revert to MLB. As MLB has done with the six teams whose games they currently produce (those are listed in the infographic under “ESPN,” which made a deal with MLB to produce those team’s games), they would likely begin to stream games for those nine teams, along with some sort of local cable/satellite/OTA broadcast version for those who don’t want to stream. Generally those deals have cost about $20 per month.
That would make half of the MLB teams’ local broadcast rights owned by the league. And that plays right into Commissioner Rob Manfred’s plan, which is to (he hopes) get all the local rights owned by MLB by the end of 2028. That is when all the league’s national TV deals expire, and Manfred thinks more money could be made by selling the local and national rights all in one package. The scary thing is, Manfred might actually be right about that.
The issue then becomes: How do you convince teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Cubs — all of whom have partial or complete ownership of their local RSN — to give up those rights to the league? Putting all the local rights in one package would likely mean dividing them equally among the 30 teams, and I’m pretty sure you can see how that would be a non-starter for teams like the Dodgers and Yankees.
So this isn’t just a thing that affects the nine FanDuel Sports Network-affiliated teams. It could, and probably will, affect everything that has to do with baseball broadcasting. It is likely going to be a topic of discussion at labor negotiations next winter. There is no easy answer.
As always, we await developments.
