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.”

In the Big Ten’s second year as a coast-to-coast, 18-team conference, its primary TV partner is going back to the well of scheduling a team from the Eastern Time Zone to play a late-night matchup on the West Coast.

In Week 4, Fox will have the national broadcast of Michigan State–USC at 11 p.m. ET on Sept. 20. 

It will mark the second such instance, following a Rutgers-USC matchup on Fox last October. However, that game was on a Friday night, directly following Game 1 of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series. With a strong lead-in (15.2 million viewers for the Fall Classic opener), Fox drew an audience of 2 million for its late-night college football broadcast.

But this year’s experiment comes on a Saturday night, following an Arizona State–Baylor Big 12 matchup at 7:30 p.m. ET on Fox. There won’t be another college football game on Fox following Game 1 of this year’s World Series on Friday, Oct. 24, but the network could opt to schedule one following Game 2 on Saturday, Oct. 25.

Michigan State head coach Jonathan Smith has not publicly reacted to the game time yet, as the scheduling announcement was released after his weekly press conference on Monday, but the football program’s official social media account did. “It’s gonna be a late one folks,” MSU football wrote on X.

The game will be Michigan State and USC’s first matchup since a 1990 bowl game, and the Spartans’ first visit to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum since 1978.

Fox Sports helped fund the Big Ten’s expansion, agreeing in 2023 to pay Oregon and Washington $35 million to $40 million annually for joining the conference. Since home games of those West Coast schools, along with USC and UCLA, have not yet been tapped for Fox’s Big Noon Saturday game window (which would be 9 a.m. PT), the network has been utilizing them in late-night slots to help fill out its college football programming. 

The Late Show 

The Big Ten is not the only conference scheduling late-night West Coast matchups.

On Saturday, Boston College visits Stanford in a game that will kick off at 10:30 p.m. ET and be broadcast on ACC Network. Minnesota, which is in the Central Time Zone, also plays at 10:30 p.m. ET at Cal.

With less than a week left in the WNBA season, the league hit another growth milestone.

The WNBA eclipsed 3 million total attendees for its regular-season games Sunday, three weeks after breaking its regular-season attendance record of 2.36 million set in 2002, according to data from Across the Timeline. 

The league benefited from its longest regular season ever, stretching out the season to 44 games per team—the maximum number of games allowed under the current CBA. However, the 2025 average attendance (10,954 attendees) is still the most for a season, and will likely break the previous record set in 1998 of 10,868 attendees.

The WNBA will need to average 8,511 attendees for the remaining 10 games to break the average attendance record. Only three teams averaged fewer than 8,000 fans at their home games this season—and the two lowest teams (Washington Mystics, Atlanta Dream) already hosted their home finales.

The Indiana Fever and Golden State Valkyries are the biggest drivers of attendance growth. 

The Fever led the league in total attendance, drawing nearly 700,000 fans when combining home and road contests—100,000 more than any other team. This was driven by about half the league moving home games against Indiana to larger arenas to accommodate fans driven by interest in Caitlin Clark.

Unfortunately, Clark was able to play in only 13 total games this year, with five coming on the road. Three of those road games were moved to bigger arenas, including on July 15 in Boston against the Connecticut Sun. Clark suffered a right groin injury in the fourth quarter, and it would ultimately be her final contest of the 2025 season.

On the other hand, Golden State set the standard for expansion teams with its home court attendance. The Valkyries announced Saturday that they sold out all 22 home games at the Chase Center this season. They also set the WNBA record for total (397,408) and average (18,064) home attendance.

Golden State also clinched a playoff berth, becoming the first expansion team in league history to qualify for the postseason. However, the team may not get to host a playoff game at the Chase Center. Its first-round home game will be moved to the SAP Center in San Jose due to a schedule conflict.