DAZN Takes the Pacers, at Half the Old Price

The Indiana Pacers have named DAZN their exclusive regional broadcast partner in a five-year deal that runs through the 2030-31 season. A team-branded streaming service launches in early September and covers the club's full regional footprint: Indiana, Kentucky, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. The package splits the schedule between free and paid.

Twenty-two regular-season games and four preseason games will be free inside the app, and 15 of those 22 are expected to simulcast on an over-the-air partner that has not yet been named. The remaining 49 games sit behind a season pass priced at $119.99, or $59.99 for fans who buy before Oct. 15. The economics are far less generous than the old arrangement.

Sports Business Journal reports that DAZN is guaranteeing $8 million, plus a 50-50 split of advertising revenue. Before that relationship collapsed, the Pacers were collecting $17 million from FanDuel Sports Network. That is not a small haircut.

It is roughly half. The Pacers are hardly alone. FanDuel Sports Network was run by Main Street Sports Group, the renamed successor to Diamond Sports Group, and Main Street's wind-down left 13 NBA teams without a local broadcaster.

Indiana is the second of those 13 to land with DAZN in this fashion, and reporting suggests DAZN is deep in talks with several more, including the Cavaliers, Grizzlies, Timberwolves and Spurs. The fine print explains the urgency on both sides. Every one of these DAZN deals is believed to carry an exit clause after the coming season, which is exactly when the NBA is expected to launch its own local media hub.

The league has been urging affected teams to sign one-year deals, or at minimum to build in an opt-out after a single season, so that no club is locked into a long-term regional contract while the centralized product is being built. Read that way, the Pacers deal is less about DAZN building a durable regional sports network in Indiana and more about DAZN serving as the bridge loan while the NBA builds the real thing. Everyone involved seems to assume DAZN will not be Indiana's broadcaster forever.

But the bridge is only half of what DAZN is up to. The company has also landed exclusive direct-to-consumer streaming rights to MSG Network and YES Network, two of the healthiest regional networks in the country and entirely unconnected to Main Street's collapse. The larger bet is about scale: if DAZN is already the incumbent in enough markets, across enough leagues, by the time the NBA's hub goes live for 2027-28, it may earn a seat at the table when the permanent deal is negotiated.

Or being everywhere first may simply make DAZN the best-paid placeholder in the industry. Read that way, the Pacers deal is less about DAZN building a durable regional sports network in Indiana and more about DAZN serving as the bridge loan while the NBA builds the real thing.

to market Sept. 1 with a request for information, according to SportBusiness. The Confederation of African Football has invited bids for 2027 Africa Cup of Nations inventory, including sub-Saharan rights in English and Portuguese; the tender emphasizes a minimum guarantee but drops the in-house funding requirement that torpedoed the previous year's process. LFP Media is expected to tender Ligue 1 domestic rights as soon as October.

replaced its front-of-shirt gambling sponsor with financial services firm Marex. Newcastle United, which lost Sela Entertainment, is reportedly about to announce a deal with Knox Hydration, while Hollywoodbets committed five more years to Brentford. SportBusiness flags the pattern: renewals with white-label betting brands are conspicuously absent, and ahead of the league's front-of-shirt betting ban, financial services companies are quietly stepping into the category bookmakers are being pushed out of.

activation offering gives a limited number of Publicis clients access to 45,000 Division I athletes across 68 Power Four universities. Kelce's 3 Arts Sports, part of Lionsgate's 3 Arts Entertainment, is strategic operating partner; Publicis Sports sets brand strategy and TEKTA executes. CEO Suzy Deering says local activation at national scale is challenging, maybe impossible, for brands alone.

Against roughly $1.9 billion in NIL spending, the real product is compliance and speed.

division that integrates brands into gameplay and live experiences across a portfolio including the biggest football and American football franchises. Sports games are one of the few places a brand can buy pitchside signage that renders unchanged for a decade. By selling it in-house rather than through a rights agency, EA is signaling exactly who it thinks owns that inventory: EA.

Five years through 2030-31, plus 50-50 ad revenue share DPG Media → Viaplay Netherlands €142M M&A; Videoland absorbs the Dutch business and its rights portfolio KKR → Arctos Partners $1B Agreed; pending approval from the major U.S. leagues Publicis Sports, 3 Arts Sports → TEKTA Undisclosed NIL network launch spanning 45,000 athletes and 68 schools Marex → Nottingham Forest Undisclosed Front-of-shirt deal replacing outgoing gambling sponsor Hollywoodbets → Brentford Undisclosed Five-year renewal US Bank → San Francisco 49ers Undisclosed Practice patch extension, folded into official bank agreement Formula 1 → Pirelli Undisclosed One-year tire supply option triggered, extending through 2028

Nike ran its winningest female athletes in the ad slot immediately before Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl halftime show, then carried the momentum through hand-painted murals and athlete films at other events. It earned a 21% share of conversation on the night, highest of 66 advertisers, and lifted the athletes' online mentions 1,000%. The media plan, not the film, won.

Wienie 500

Six Wienermobiles raced live at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during Indy 500 weekend, with commentary from Fox Sports hosts and a free-to-play prediction pool. With the Wienermobile already recognized by 85% of the audience, Oscar Mayer built a race only it could own instead of paying to show up at someone else's.

The Barcelona-based short-format indoor football property, built entirely on streamer audiences, is cutting staff as it pivots toward a more global strategy. It was the go-to example for anyone arguing creator-led formats would outrun traditional leagues. The audience is still there.

What nobody quite modeled was the cost of running these formats at national scale, in multiple countries, all at once. Como Sells One Shirt Three Ways Uber has moved from the front to the back of Como's shirt, handing the front to Revolut, while Canva made a rare move into sports sponsorship with the same Serie A club. Canva is selling less to fans than to whoever makes the club's graphics all week, a narrower but arguably more useful audience.

Como has sold three jersey positions to three barely overlapping categories. T

and Who Wants to Rebuild It The Pacers deal is one move in a larger land grab. As the NBA buys time to build its own national hub, DAZN is running two plays at once. he network the Pacers just left, FanDuel Sports Network, was run by Main Street Sports Group, itself a rebrand of Diamond Sports Group, the operator behind the old Bally Sports regional networks. Diamond filed for Chapter 11 in 2023 under debt left over from the cable-bundle era, spent about two years in bankruptcy court and emerged in 2025 with a new name, a sponsorship deal with FanDuel and a pitch as a leaner, streaming-forward regional sports network.

For decades that model was one of the most reliable businesses in media. Cable and satellite providers paid regional networks a per-subscriber fee for every subscriber in a territory, whether or not the household watched a game, because sports sat inside bundles nobody could opt out of. Those fees funded the rights payments teams grew used to.

Cord-cutting dried up that guaranteed stream, leaving networks like Diamond's holding contracts priced for a subscriber base that was no longer there. The reinvention lasted less than a year. Main Street began missing rights payments in December 2025, and by early 2026 NBA and MLB teams were reportedly going unpaid.

DAZN attempted an emergency acquisition to keep the operation alive; when that fell through, Main Street confirmed it was winding down. Thirteen NBA teams became local free agents at once: the Hawks, Hornets, Cavaliers, Pistons, Pacers, Clippers, Grizzlies, Heat, Bucks, Timberwolves, Thunder, Magic and Spurs. Several MLB clubs were caught in the same collapse.

According to Awful Announcing, the NBA is urging every affected team to sign only one-year deals or build in an opt-out after one season. Commissioner Adam Silver has been direct about the timeline: “We'll cobble together a series of solutions for this season, but I feel good that we'll have something on a national basis for the following year.” Expect a patchwork for 2026-27 and the real fix for 2027-28. Forbes and other outlets report the league is in advanced talks with YouTube for distribution of that centralized hub, with ESPN also circling, in a deal reportedly worth more than $1 billion.

The league wants to own the hub, rather than let one streamer quietly consolidate its local rights, for one reason: leverage. A league-run hub means the NBA controls the pricing, the bundle and the audience data. Handing that permanently to a single platform, as NFL Sunday Ticket effectively did in moving to YouTube TV, trades years of negotiating power for one good near-term check.

The bridge deals buy time. DAZN, backed by Len Blavatnik's Access Industries, is no scrappy startup. It already holds major international rights to the Premier League and Serie A and a large share of the world's boxing and combat sports calendar.

U.S. regional rights are a new and comparatively small category for it, which makes its aggression more notable, not less. Its first play is the visible one: picking off Main Street's stranded teams on cheap bridge deals. Beyond the reported talks with the Cavaliers, Grizzlies, Timberwolves and Spurs, the Hornets and Magic have been mentioned as possibilities, potentially putting seven or more NBA teams on DAZN by next season's tipoff.

The play is backed by capital: DAZN spent roughly $100 million earlier in 2026 to acquire ViewLift, in its own words to build “comprehensive solutions for sports teams' local media rights.” The second play has nothing to do with Main Street. DAZN has landed exclusive direct-to-consumer rights to MSG Network and YES Network, covering seven franchises across three leagues: the Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, Yankees, Nets, Devils and Sabres. Gotham Sports app subscribers are being migrated to DAZN, and CEO Shay Segev called it “a defining moment for us.” Together, the two plays describe a company trying to become the default streaming layer for local sports, at both ends of the risk spectrum.

Others are solving the problem differently. The NHL has largely moved games to over-the-air broadcast, which works well in big markets and less well in smaller ones. MLB and the NBA are reportedly in talks with Prime Video and ESPN Unlimited about a “streaming RSN” that could end local blackouts, probably at a higher price, while the Angels and Braves are launching regional networks of their own.

Major League Soccer offers a caution: its own direct-to-consumer service didn't last, and its games moved to Apple TV+. Owning the rights is not the same as owning the outcome. Three things will decide whether DAZN's land grab proves shrewd or an expensive dead end: how many of the remaining stranded teams sign with DAZN rather than Victory+, ViewLift or someone else before opening night; whether the MSG and YES deal becomes the proof of concept DAZN brings to every league negotiation; and what the NBA's hub deal looks like when it is announced for 2027-28.

The Pacers deal isn't DAZN's endgame. It is one claim in a land grab aimed at being the incumbent everywhere before the NBA's hub arrives, and the open question is whether that buys a seat at the table or just a well-paid placeholder role.