Sports media company Barstool Sports, currently owned by The Chernin Group, is said to be in advanced talks to sell a majority stake in the company to Penn National Gaming, a regional gambling company that operates 41 properties in 19 US states, according to sources cited by VOX Recode.
Barstool was last valued at more than $100 million, but a potential purchase price could be much higher, and might create the biggest media-gambling tie-up in the US since the Supreme Court green lighted sports betting in 2018.
Barstool founder Dave Portnoy commented: “We continue to speak or have spoken with everybody from DraftKings to FanDuel to Stars to PointsBet to Penn to William Hill to MGM to Rush Street, etc. I think that if we aligned ourselves with one company with a shared vision, that company would have an extraordinary advantage in the race to becoming the leading gambling company in the United States.” The Big Lead had previously reported that Barstool was looking at a deal to sell itself to a gambling company.
The most logical use of Barstool’s brand would be to help Penn National move into online sports betting. Since PASPA’s repeal, a host of media companies have tried to capitalize on what they think will be a sports betting boom by creating their own betting-centric properties, as well as by making deals with traditional casinos like Caesars and online betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel. Vox Media has a deal between DraftKings and Vox’s SB Nation sports property.
Barstool already has a Barstool Bets site, which publishes sports-betting stories and videos, and runs free sports-betting games; the company also has deals to direct its users to betting operations like MGM Resorts.
Until now, the biggest media and sports betting deal in the US has been Fox Corp.’s purchase of a little less than 5 percent of The Stars Group, an online gambling company, for $236 million last year; the two companies launched a Fox-branded sports betting unit a few months later —FOX Bet. Barstool founder Portnoy sold a majority stake in his company to The Chernin Group for a reported $10 million in 2016; in 2018, Chernin put another $15 million into the company at a reported valuation of more than $100 million. Chernin is a media investment and holding group run by former Rupert Murdoch lieutenant Peter Chernin.