Six weeks ago the Cincinnati Reds and FanDuel Sports Network announced that the two sides had come to an agreement to renew their partnership to broadcast the club’s games in the 2026 season. The previous deal was only for one year, covering just the 2025 season. Cincinnati had a plan in place to broadcast their games through MLB.tv and local cable/satellite/streaming services for 2025 before announcing the new deal in mid-January. That deal turned out well for everyone involved when it came to viewership, which was up across the board.
This morning a report by Tom Friend at the Sports Business Journal is now throwing the deal for 2026 into doubt and it could be a big problem for not just the Reds, but for plenty of teams in Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL. Main Street Sports Group, who now is in charge of FanDuel Sports Network missed a payment to the St. Louis Cardinals this month. And it seems that they’ve known for a bit of time that they are in trouble because in the last week reports have come out that they’ve been looking to sell a majority of the business to DAZN, a sports streaming service best known for it’s combat sports broadcast but carries many sports world wide.
Friend’s reporting, though, suggests that if that deal isn’t completed by the end of the month that FanDuel Sports Network is going to “wind down and dissolve it’s business at the end of this year’s NBA and NHL regular seasons”.
For teams around Major League Baseball the timing of this all would at least give them time to get things figured out before their first scheduled broadcast of games in spring training, much less the regular season. If FanDuel Sports Network were to go under it seems very likely that with the lack of time and how things were looking even a year ago the the Reds would almost assuredly transition to having MLB.tv produce their games. For now it seems we’re all back in limbo and a waiting game to see what happens.
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