Sinclair’s Bad Bet on Local Sports TV Has Amazon Digging in the Bargain Bin
The broadcaster’s Diamond Sports Group got tripped up by cord cutting, Covid and battles with MLB over streaming, leaving an opening for the tech giant.
Illustration by Christian Blaza for Bloomberg Markets
Sinclair Broadcast Group looked as if it were getting a great deal. In 2019 the TV conglomerate bought 21 regional sports networks from Walt Disney Co. for $9.6 billion. The package had been valued at almost double that amount the year before, but an acceleration in cord cutting, combined with Disney’s rush to sell so it could complete its purchase of 21st Century Fox, pulled down the valuation.
Bidders as diverse as Apollo Global Management and Major League Baseball came forward with offers, hoping to get the rights to broadcast games from teams such as the New York Yankees and the Detroit Pistons. But no one was quite as bullish as Sinclair: It outbid MLB, which made the second-highest offer, by almost $1 billion. Sinclair had raised $8 billion of debt and put about $1.5 billion of its own money in the deal.