ESPN Betting Czar: Why We Pivoted From Penn to DraftKings

There is optimism around ESPN that DraftKings will be a better fit as a gambling partner. 

Earlier this month, ESPN and Penn Entertainment ended their 10-year, $2 billion contract for ESPN Bet after just two years. Instead, ESPN has entered into a multiyear partnership with DraftKings to be its official betting partner. On Dec. 1, Penn’s ESPN Bet app will rebrand as theScore Bet (named after the Canadian brand Penn acquired in 2021).

“This is absolutely the best next step for us in the betting space,” ESPN VP of betting and fantasy Mike Morrison told Front Office Sports. “We want to be with a partner that’s scaled, that puts an emphasis on innovation, that has similar ways of operating as ESPN does.”

DraftKings cofounder and CEO Jason Robins met ESPN’s betting team in person last week. In an interview with CNBC earlier this month, Robins mentioned the deal with ESPN as well as partnerships with NBC and Amazon, saying that one goal was to increase share in the NBA betting space. “NBA is a sport that, relative to NFL, we’ve had lower share in,” Robins said. “Part of it was for years our chief competitor [FanDuel] had the Turner deal, and we had nothing.” Now DraftKings has a slew of big media partnerships to match. 

After Penn switched its partner from Barstool Sports to ESPN in 2023, Penn projected ESPN Bet would have a 20% market share by 2027; instead, it has hovered around 5%. 

Nevertheless, Morrison said the way in which ESPN directed its flywheel of content and administrative buy-in around gambling promotion stood out to Robins and DraftKings as the new deal was formalized.

“If I look at our efforts over the last several years, and certainly the last two, we began to really get all of the company—on the content side, the product side, technology, marketing, responsible gaming, sales—really aligned that this betting initiative is a really big thing,” Morrison said. “We began to pull a lot of resources in the company and effort around storytelling and framing in ways that we hadn’t yet done. … I think Jason and DraftKings saw that, and by their own admission, they were both impressed and at times surprised. They said, ‘We didn’t think you would develop everything that you did.’”

With Penn, ESPN (and Barstool before it) had to be the primary marketing driver of awareness and account sign-ups. DraftKings is already a behemoth, neck and neck each quarter with Flutter’s FanDuel as the top two betting apps by market share in the United States. (Hard Rock, through its partnership with the Seminole Tribe, has a monopoly in Florida, where betting numbers aren’t publicly released.) 

As of the fourth quarter of last year, DraftKings had 4.8 million average monthly paying customers. Therefore, besides trying to draw in new customers, ESPN will also be marketing to a large cohort of existing customers. 

While DraftKings has had sponsorship deals with ESPN before, now will be the first time it is the official odds provider, meaning that any time they talk about gambling implications on-air the DraftKings numbers will be mentioned.

Asked whether ESPN personalities such as Stephen A. Smith and Mike Greenberg will appear in commercials for DraftKings as they did for ESPN Bet, Morrison said, “It’s definitely something that DraftKings is very interested in, but we’re going to take our time there and figure out what makes sense.”