ESPN-parent company Walt Disney secured a stake in daily fantasy sports-turned-sportsbook DraftKings as part of its acquisition of 21st Century Fox, SportTechie has confirmed.
Disney now owns DraftKings “through one of its subsidiaries,” according to a DraftKings spokesperson. Disney scooped up the stake as part of its $71.3 billion purchase of the film and entertainment business, a colossal media deal that closed at the end of March.
Interestingly, the revelations come just a few weeks after Disney CEO Bob Iger said Disney doesn’t “intend to go into the gambling business.”
“We’ve already done some things that we would integrate it into our programming, but not to the extent that we would be facilitating gambling as an entity,” Iger said on a conference call with analysts following the company’s second quarter earnings report on May 8. “In other words, we’ll provide programming that will, I guess, be designed to enlighten people who are betting on sports. But that’s as far as we would go.”
Iger didn’t expand on what that future sports betting programming might look like. Last week, however, ESPN announced that it was partnering with Caesars Entertainment to open its own television studio inside The LINQ Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The set, scheduled to open in 2020, will be used to produce sports betting content for its new “Daily Wager” show and other related programming. With the deal, Caesars became ESPN’s official odds data provider.
Disney also intends to use the studio to have a presence at sports betting events that are hosted in Las Vegas, where sports betting has been legal for several years. The NFL Draft, for example, is slated to take place in Vegas next year. Sin City is also home to the NHL’s Golden Knights, and the NFL’s Raiders will move to a stadium just off the Las Vegas Strip in 2020. On the call with analysts, Iger pointed to NFL Sunday Ticket and said there has been “some exploration as to whether there was an opportunity there.”
He failed to expand on any potential NFL deal, saying, simply, that Disney is “very bullish on the NFL” and its relationship with ESPN.
“I think we all believe that there are opportunities to strengthen our relationship with them,” he said.
Disney and DraftKings have been flirting for years. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that Disney had invested $250 million in the daily fantasy sports site, though nothing ever came from those reports.
Whether Disney ever actively does anything with its stake in DraftKings remains to be seen. Disney has spent millions of dollars opposing gambling in the past and Iger has made clear the company’s stance on facilitating gambling beyond just reporting the news and educating the mainstream market.