DAZN Has Reportedly Bought Local Rights to 19 Teams With No Disclosed Fees. The NBA Is Planning a Central Hub for 2027-28.

The streaming service DAZN is quietly assembling something close to a national sports network out of local pieces. Front Office Sports reported, according to Boxing Insider, that DAZN has acquired local rights to 19 teams across Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL and the WNBA over the past six months. The Desk's reporting confirms a narrower core: DAZN is the exclusive local partner for five NBA teams, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves and San Antonio Spurs, and is taking over streaming for New York teams. None of the reports disclose what DAZN is paying. What they do show is a business model, and a looming threat to it.

What DAZN has bought, and what the sources say

Boxing Insider names twelve of the 19 teams: the Yankees, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Devils, Islanders and Sabres, through agreements with the YES Network and MSG Networks, plus the five NBA teams above. The Desk says several New York teams that streamed through the Gotham Sports App will shift their streaming to DAZN, and that live sports from MSG and YES are also moving there. It adds that DAZN will offer local games from more than a dozen NBA teams on its own platform this year. Those statements are not identical to the 19-team claim, which spans four leagues and a six-month window. The sources do not reconcile the counts, and the full list of 19 has not been published in anything reviewed here.

Why these rights are cheap

The supply exists because the regional sports network model, in which a cable channel pays a team for local rights and recovers the cost through carriage fees charged to every cable subscriber, weakened as households left cable. The Desk lists Altitude, NBC Sports regional channels and FanDuel Sports Network, formerly Fox Sports Net and Bally Sports, among the networks that teams relied on. Teams that lost a stable network buyer now sell to whoever will pay, and The Desk notes that local rights are cheaper to negotiate than national ones. It also reports that teams working with local broadcasters typically sign deals of one to three seasons. Short terms are good for a buyer who is unsure of subscriber demand: if a package fails, the exposure ends in a few years.

Scale gives some context. The Desk reports that DAZN has agreed to pay AU$3.4 billion, about US$2.37 billion, to acquire the Australian pay-TV company Foxtel. Local team deals are plainly a different category of commitment. They are, so far as anyone outside the contracts can tell, small options on markets DAZN has not yet proven it can monetise in the United States.

How the money is meant to work

Each team gets its own hub on DAZN with live games, replays and original programming, according to Boxing Insider. A standalone Cavaliers subscription is listed at $19.99 a month. Alongside that, DAZN has sublicensed a limited number of games to free over-the-air broadcasters: Nexstar Media Group for the Pacers, TEGNA for the Grizzlies and Timberwolves, and Gray Media for the Cavaliers. The Desk says these stations will air about a dozen regular-season games this season in total, and that DAZN sees the arrangement as a way to drive future subscriptions.

This is a marketing channel dressed as a distribution deal. Free broadcast reaches fans who do not know the DAZN app exists, shows them what the product is, and points them to a paid stream for the other games in the season. The coverage mentions the sublicensing but does not connect it to unit economics, so here is the arithmetic that is possible. At $19.99 a month a subscriber is worth $239.88 a year in gross revenue (our arithmetic), before app-store fees, taxes, payment costs and any revenue share. Every 10,000 subscribers is therefore about $2.4 million a year gross. Whether that covers a rights fee depends entirely on the fee, which is undisclosed, and on how many subscribers a team's fans yield, also undisclosed. Nor do we know the direction of money in the sublicences: a station could be paying DAZN for the games, or receiving them free in return for promotion. The sources are silent.

The free-TV games also have a cost that is easy to miss. Every game aired on Nexstar, TEGNA or Gray is a game that a paying subscriber could, in principle, have bought through DAZN. A dozen games is small against a regular season, which for an NBA team is 82 games, so the leakage is limited, but the trade-off is real: DAZN is giving away a slice of the product to learn how many viewers convert.

DAZN's own account of the strategy

Pete Oliver, DAZN's CEO of Growth Markets, told Sports Media Watch, as reported by The Desk, that the company is focused on smaller regional deals with better financial terms and is interested in premium national packages in the longer term. The Desk paraphrases him as saying DAZN will not overpay or buy rights at a loss, and quotes him saying, 'We're not going to be irrational.' Boxing Insider, citing Front Office Sports, quotes him saying DAZN is in active talks with a number of teams and leagues. Oliver also described a footprint logic: with enough regional coverage, DAZN would have something like a national feel, and the company would see later where national rights go.

This is a company statement, not an outcome. DAZN has not published subscriber numbers for its US local offering, and any claim that these deals are profitable, or are not, would be unsupported. What can be said is that the strategy is consistent: buy cheap, short-term rights, use free television as a trial, and build a roster of teams before national contracts become available.

The league-hub risk

The counter-argument is structural. The Desk reports that the NBA and MLB are reportedly considering streaming platforms they control for local games, with a small number of games sublicensed to local broadcasters. Boxing Insider says the NBA plans a centralised local streaming hub for the 2027-28 season and that Amazon, ESPN and YouTube are reportedly interested. Boxing Insider calls the hub DAZN's larger target but does not say DAZN is bidding. If a league hub arrives, the teams in the hub would presumably stop selling local rights team by team, and the one-to-three-season deals DAZN is signing now would expire around the time the hub starts, or be stranded. The Desk's reporting on tenders, in which Oliver said DAZN will examine the structure and that incumbents get a window to negotiate, suggests an incumbent position could matter, but the sources do not say how tenders for a league hub would work.

There is a plausible bullish reading, too. The Desk suggests that running such an operation is probably best handled by a specialist media company like DAZN, so the hub could end up needing exactly the infrastructure DAZN is now building. In that case early local deals are a down payment on being the operator. The bearish reading is that Amazon, ESPN or YouTube, each with far larger audiences, would not need DAZN's help. Both depend on decisions that have not been announced.

The national-rights horizon

The long game runs through national contracts, and those are far off. The Desk reports that the four major leagues have national agreements running into the start of the next decade: DAZN could not offer national MLB games before 2028, and NFL and NBA national packages would not be available until the early 2030s. A buyer building a regional portfolio now is therefore holding a position for at least five years before it can compete for the biggest packages. For a sports fan, the practical result is already visible: where a team's games live in 2027-28 depends on a hub decision no one has made public, and the current DAZN deal may or may not survive it.