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Fox CEO and executive chair Lachlan Murdoch has prevailed in a long-running intrafamily dispute for future control of the Murdoch family media empire, providing a key dose of certainty and stability for sports leagues and investors.
An agreement reached Monday in a Nevada court proceeding will see three of family patriarch Rupert Murdoch’s other children—Elisabeth, James, and Prudence—gain about $1.1 billion each in return for their personal holdings in Fox Corp. and News Corp. The family drama, resolved through a complex series of financial transactions, furthered the deep parallels between the fictional television series Succession and the real-world conflicts among the Murdochs.
More substantively, though, the deal solidifies until at least 2050 the Fox status quo, with Lachlan Murdoch continuing to lead a sprawling set of holdings that includes Fox Sports. Politically conservative like his father, Lachlan Murdoch is already well-known to most major U.S. sports leagues and conferences, and he has been directly involved in most of the network’s key sports rights deals.
That will be a critical factor as over the next several years, Fox will have a series of rights up for renewal. Among them:
- FIFA: Fox holds the U.S. rights to next year’s FIFA men’s World Cup, an event to be held in North America. Within that, there is a fast-growing relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and FIFA president Gianni Infantino that has deep political symmetry with the right-leaning Fox News. The network is part of an ongoing tender process for U.S. rights to the 2030 tournament and beyond, but faces substantial competition from a mix of other linear broadcasters and streamers. Rupert Murdoch, however, recently attended the final of the FIFA Club World Cup in New Jersey with Infantino.
- MLB: Fox has been a key part of the league’s national media presence for nearly 30 years, and it enlarged its baseball presence this year with coverage of key events such as the recent MLB Speedway Classic. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, however, intends to rework the sport’s media footprint substantially in 2028, when all the league’s national-level deals expire, including Fox’s.
- NFL: The Fox America’s Game of the Week late Sunday afternoon showcase was the league’s most-watched game window last year. It’s a virtual lock, though, that the NFL will exercise an option to reopen most of its domestic deals after the 2029 season, four years early.
- Big Ten: The network’s rights deal with the power conference expires in 2030, and Fox is now at the center of a rising college football broadcasting rivalry with ESPN. As college sports continue to change at historic levels but still deliver some of the biggest non-NFL audiences anywhere, Fox will want to preserve its strong position here. Another rights deal with the Big 12 runs to 2031.
Lachlan Murdoch, meanwhile, has also been a key figure in pushing the network to a more digitally focused strategy, one that includes the recent debut of the Fox One streaming service.
Analysts now expect him to become more active in reshaping the company with the family control issues settled.
“Now that Lachlan Murdoch has cemented control in a post-Rupert world, we would not be surprised to see an increased level of aggressiveness around [mergers and acquisitions],” wrote LightShed Partners in a research note. “While Fox bought back $1.25 billion of stock in 2025, with the company dramatically outperforming its peers, the company is sitting on considerable balance-sheet firepower.”
