DAZN is paying the price for its deep investment in soccer rights.
The sports streaming platform sustained an operating loss of $1.36 billion for 2021 and an overall loss of $2.3 billion.
The losses, which CEO Shay Segev primarily attributed to the addition of Italian and German soccer rights, outweighed DAZN’s $1.56 billion in revenue that year — a 79% year-over-year increase.
- In 2022, revenue increased to $2.3 billion.
- DAZN has lost more than $6 billion since its 2016 launch.
- In 2021, billionaire owner Len Blavatnik agreed to a recapitalization of DAZN, dropping its net debt to $14.3 million at year’s end, compared to $1.3 billion the year prior.
Segev said an IPO could happen in the next two or three years, and that the company would be open to strategic investors.
“I really don’t have any preference, I would just think that it actually makes sense for this to become a public company,” he said. “The Netflix story, the Amazon story — I think DAZN is going there as well.”
DAZN Down
DAZN’s $2.7 billion deal to air Serie A in Italy for three seasons has come with other problems.
The service has experienced several outages, drawing criticism from viewers. On Tuesday, DAZN agreed to take steps to fix the problems, including offering affected subscribers a refund and setting up a Network Operation Centre in Italy.
