Regional Sports Networks Are Dead. Here's Who Pays the Teams Now.

Diamond Sports Group, which operated the Bally Sports regional sports network empire under Sinclair Broadcast Group, filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and spent two years in slow-motion dissolution. By 2026, multiple MLB and NBA teams entered the season without a local media rights deal. The regional sports network — the primary vehicle for local sports broadcasting since the 1980s and a reliable nine-figure annual revenue source for mid-market franchises — is functionally dead as a business model.

The RSN model worked on a specific assumption: that pay TV subscribers would keep paying for large cable bundles and that sports would anchor those bundles and command escalating carriage fees. The assumption held for forty years. Then cord-cutting accelerated beyond every projection. The carriage fees RSNs paid to teams were predicated on subscriber counts that no longer existed.

The average NFL team is now valued at $7.65 billion. These valuations are built on national rights deals — the NFL distributes approximately $10 billion annually through Amazon, NBC, ESPN, and Fox. The teams with the most RSN exposure are mid-market MLB franchises, where local broadcasting was a larger share of revenue than in the NFL or NBA. What replaces the RSN is still being answered — streaming services, direct-to-consumer packages, league-operated platforms — but the economics are not equivalent to what a healthy RSN deal would generate. The private equity money flowing into sports is betting on the national rights economy. The RSN collapse is a local problem the national valuation boom has temporarily masked. When mid-market teams enter a season without a local TV deal, the revenue gap shows up in player development, payroll, and competitive capacity. Related: The $186 Billion Game