When the rights buyers stop chasing uphill

If you run a league that isn't one of the big ones, it’s worth paying attention when a buyer starts sorting its shelf.

When Paramount closed on Warner Bros. Discovery in October, the combined company, Skydance, ended up holding 36 premium sports-rights properties, the most of any US company, from the NFL and March Madness down to the French Open. It also took on about $80 billion of debt, and Fitch cut its credit rating.

A portfolio that size and a balance sheet that heavy don't sit together for long without choices.

On Skydance's first earnings call since the merger, chairman David Ellison said the company believes in sports and will stay a leader in it, and that his team looks at each rights package on its own and as part of the portfolio.

Sources have told The Ankler the company may be exploring selling some of its smaller deals, and named the Big Ten, NASCAR and the French Open. A person familiar with the company said it was too early to know whether anything is for sale. On the day of that call, Bloomberg reported Skydance was weighing a bid for French football.

Nothing has been sold, but there are patterns worth watching.

What's actually going on

Sports media rights have been on a steady, upward trajectory, with each league's deals escalating and getting more expensive. What stands out is the buyers: the companies purchasing these rights and trying to monetize them.

To me, the question becomes whether they can keep pace with that growth.

The leagues and conferences wrote most of the terms. They are the product, the scarce asset that creates bidding wars, so they've held the leverage. For a long time the math was easy for the buyers. But the economics have continued to diverge. Most of these deals were built on the linear broadcast model, and the ability to monetize rights looks different now, with a bigger digital footprint and more global connectivity. At the same time, the leagues keep demanding growth in what they charge. That gap will keep widening, and it will force decisions on both sides.

Advertising has never covered the check on its own. Fox pays about $2.3 billion a year for its NFL package; its NFL games bring in more than $1.3 billion a year in ads, according to Sportico. Most of the rest comes from the fees cable and satellite companies pay to carry the network, and a former Fox Sports executive estimates the NFL drives about 60% of them. Those fees are paid per subscriber, and subscribers are the part of the model that keeps shrinking.

As the price of top-tier rights keeps rising, buyers face a real economic decision: keep chasing uphill, or find a reset in lower-priced properties that still offer live audiences and many of the same things that make media rights exciting and lucrative.

Both halves of that decision have played out before.

When a buyer gets outbid

Turner became an NBA partner in 1984, and live games have aired on TNT since 1988. In 2024 the league signed new national deals worth a reported $77 billion over 11 years with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon, and Turner ended up on the outside of a four-decade partnership.

What it did next is the part worth watching. In October 2024, TNT Sports signed a multi-year deal, and made an investment, with Unrivaled, a new three-on-three women's basketball league. Its settlement with the NBA that November included a sublicense of Big 12 games from ESPN: 13 football and 15 men's basketball games a season, starting in 2025.

Turner lost its NBA rights and pivoted into live sports content that looks and feels downstream.

When a buyer can't keep pace

The regional sports networks show the other half. Diamond Sports, which ran the Bally Sports networks, had local deals with 14 Major League Baseball clubs going into 2023. It started missing payments and filed for bankruptcy that March, carrying more than $8 billion of debt. When it missed the Padres' payment, about $60 million a year, MLB took over the team's broadcasts.

The company came out of bankruptcy in late 2024 as Main Street Sports. In January 2026, nine clubs ended their deals after it missed more payments and proposed lower fees. By February, MLB was producing local TV for 15 teams, half the league, on what Front Office Sports described as an "eat-what-you-kill" model: no guaranteed rights fee, only what each club can earn from streaming subscriptions, advertising and carriage. Some teams faced annual drops in the eight figures. "We are not providing financial assistance right now," Commissioner Rob Manfred said.

In this case, the buyer couldn't keep pace, and the properties absorbed the difference.

What's different this time

Those were one network losing one league, and one regional model breaking under its own debt. Skydance is a single company holding three dozen premium properties at once, with at least $6 billion in cost savings promised over three years, while the NFL reportedly holds a change-in-control provision and wants a richer deal. The properties that hold up those carriage fees are the ones a buyer can least afford to lose. The rest get judged on what they earn on their own.

Together, the three properties named in the reports cost about $515 million a year. CBS's NFL package alone runs about $2.1 billion, and last season Sportico reports it helped bring in about $1.5 billion in distribution fees.

In the near term, I believe the Big Four will keep benefiting from the bidding war. Their traditional linear buyers stay in play because they're afraid to lose the product and lose that live access. And as the leagues expand globally, there's room to build packages with the Netflixes, Amazons and YouTube TVs of the world, pulling in an additional revenue stream from global markets across streaming, and potentially direct-to-consumer if that's on the roadmap.

The athletic directors are feeling it right now. Revenue share is anchored into these media rights deals, so the rights economics decide whether a Power Four program can turn a profit, whether a Group of Five or smaller school can build a sustainable model, and how either one looks at changing conferences for better economics.

Media executives feel it differently, as they try to project what the rights market looks like a few years out.

And for investors, media rights values have become the number one indicator of valuation for a lot of franchises.

Where the reset lands

Emerging leagues offer a really attractive option. It's still live entertainment with captive audiences, even if some of those audiences are more niche. They represent a much more affordable entry point for media rights buyers to get in front of similar audiences. An attractive price point on a solid product with validated demand has to be an intriguing path to consider.

The biggest buyer in the market has said what it's grading. Ellison told investors his team weighs each package by the size, engagement and advertising value of its audience, and, on streaming, by whether it brings in subscribers, keeps them engaged and supports the rest of the business. On new deals, he said, "every right has to earn its place." None of that requires being the NFL.

The leagues I've seen work well take a stepwise approach. They start as event models, either working their way around the country or anchored in one central location. They get the messaging right, and they get the business model and the unit economics together. They build a cult following, and only from that point take the next step and scale into a league.

The groups that came out of the gate as if they were competing with the current NFL or NBA business model, just at a smaller scale, have failed more often than not. The reality is that the Big Four didn't start in the model they're in now.

The emerging leagues that will succeed understand the power of building a strong foundation, mastering unit economics and scaling from there. They are also more open to serving smaller, niche communities to start, because they can perfect the customer experience while customer acquisition costs are still low.

Where it goes

The assumption that buyers will keep paying up breaks the day one of the key players on the linear side decides a Big Four deal isn't worth the cost anymore.

To me, Turner's move into live sports downstream was one of the early cracks in the foundation. When one of the bigger opportunities goes the same way, it will shake up the rest of the linear broadcast world, and that's when the downstream thesis comes into focus.

Before that call comes, before a buyer walks away from the top of the market and comes looking downstream, which leagues will be ready with the demand, the unit economics and the entry price that make it an easy decision?

—MC

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Sources: Skydance Form 10-Q, quarter ended 30 Sep 2026 (WBD merger closed 6 Oct 2026) · TheDesk, Skydance's CBS and TNT sports portfolio (Oct 2026) · The Ankler, "David Ellison Has 36 Sports Deals He Can't Afford. What Goes First" (28 Oct 2026) · Sports Media Watch, Skydance earnings call, debt and Ligue 1 report (Nov 2026) · Bloomberg, Disney and Skydance eye TV rights bids for French football's Ligue 1 (9 Nov 2026) · Stream TV Insider, WBD's NBA settlement (Nov 2024) · On3, ESPN sublicenses Big 12 games to TNT (16 Nov 2024) · Warner Bros. Discovery press release, TNT Sports multi-year media partnership (16 Oct 2024) · Front Office Sports, MLB takes over Padres broadcasts (31 May 2023) · MLB Trade Rumors, nine teams terminate contracts with Main Street Sports (9 Jan 2026) · Front Office Sports, MLB Media set to handle half of the league's teams in 2026 (10 Feb 2026) · Sportico, "NFL's Stalled Media-Rights Renewals Don't Signal Weakness" (Aug 2026) · Front Office Sports, Morning Edition: Skydance's consolidated sports hub (10 Nov 2026) · Sportico, Anthony Crupi, "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mogul: Ellison Faces Tough Choices at Sports Unit" (9 Nov 2026) · Awful Announcing, Bob Thompson on retransmission fees and the NFL.