The regional sports network model has been cratering around Major League Baseball for multiple years now, and Tom Ricketts thinks the Cubs got out ahead of it.<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters Monday at spring training in Mesa, Arizona, the Cubs chairman called Marquee Sports Network \u2014 which the team launched in 2020<\/a> \u2014 one of the best decisions the organization has ever made, even as the broader RSN landscape continues to deteriorate<\/a> around them.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven all the market headwinds for RSNs, I think Marquee is one of the best things we ever did,\u201d Ricketts said, per Meghan Montemurro of the Chicago Tribune<\/a>. \u201cTo be in control of our own destiny and be able to produce the games we want to produce the way we want to produce them, with the right people and the right staff and the right level of production quality, for us it\u2019s been a huge home run. It\u2019s been able to give us a chance to control our own destiny for a while and has been maybe the smartest thing we\u2019ve done in all these years.\u201d<\/p>\n The backdrop to those comments is the near-total collapse<\/a> of the FanDuel Sports Network RSN group. Main Street Sports Group \u2014 the successor to Diamond Sports Group, which spent 20 months in Chapter 11 bankruptcy before emerging in November 2024 \u2014 has been on the verge of Chapter 7 liquidation after a proposed sale to DAZN fell apart<\/a>. All nine MLB teams that entered into 2026 contracts with Main Street have now officially terminated their deals<\/a> with the company.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean Ricketts is pretending the broader environment is fine, even from his more comfortable perch. The Cubs may be in better shape than most, but the local TV side of the business \u2014 which for decades generated hundreds of millions in annual rights fees for individual franchises \u2014 is in freefall, and there\u2019s no clear model yet to replace what\u2019s been lost.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are some challenges,\u201d Ricketts acknowledged. \u201cThe regional sports network model has been under pressure for the last few years. Certain teams felt it the most this offseason, and it\u2019ll take a while for it to work out, but it\u2019s certainly a challenge for the entire league.\u201d<\/p>\n The longer-term question hanging over Marquee \u2014 and every other team-owned network \u2014 is what MLB\u2019s local rights landscape looks like by 2028<\/a>. Commissioner Rob Manfred has said publicly<\/a> that he believes the league will control local broadcast rights for all 30 teams by that year, with the goal of eventually packaging them into a single massive deal with a tech company or streaming platform. Close to two-thirds of the league will have their local rights available by then, including the six remaining Diamond-era deals that expire that year. Manfred\u2019s vision is essentially a nationalized MLB.tv-style product<\/a> that includes in-market games, which would seemingly undercut the value of independently owned networks like Marquee.<\/p>\n \u201cWe love the network, and we love our independence,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n That independence, right now, looks like exactly the kind of thing other MLB owners wish they had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The regional sports network model has been cratering around Major League Baseball for multiple years now, and Tom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2399],"tags":[5,138,24,4245,161,39700,7323,58481,1897,4,75946,50223,42106,6550],"class_list":{"0":"post-579109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-cubs","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-cubs","11":"tag-chicagocubs","12":"tag-cubs","13":"tag-diamond-sports-group","14":"tag-fanduel-sports-network","15":"tag-main-street-sports-group","16":"tag-marquee-sports-network","17":"tag-mlb","18":"tag-mlb-local-rights","19":"tag-regional-sports-networks","20":"tag-rsn","21":"tag-tom-ricketts"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116091326512480185","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}