admin Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley became one of sports media industry’s biggest players in one fell swoop.
In late August, after a long, protracted and very public bidding process, Sinclair secured the purchase of 21 regional sports networks (excluding YES Network) that Disney was forced to offload as part of its acquisition of 21st Century Fox.
“Personally, it was a roller coaster,” Ripley said after a panel at last month’s Advertising Week in New York, where he sat alongside NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and former NBA commissioner David Stern.
“The great thing is you had this transparency,” Ripley said. “It’s unusual to have that in a process where you feel you have a good lay of the land, but sometimes it was almost too much information. You’re like, ‘What do you do with all this?’ You can out-think yourself.”
In the end, Ripley said Sinclair was this close to being beaten out by Liberty Media for the group of sports networks that hold the TV rights to roughly 55% of the MLB, NHL, NBA and MLS franchises, adding that they essentially created their own competition.
“The distributors, the cable companies of the world, didn’t want us to win,” he said, even though Sinclair would still be relatively smaller than some of its cable company competitors. “We were combining some of the most strongest sports assets in the market with some of the most watched channels in the market in the form of the broadcast stations.”
For bidding process gone a day or too longer, Ripley said, Liberty probably would’ve defeated Sinclair. This came just over a year after Sinclair’s attempted $3.9 billion merger agreement with Tribune Media Company collapsed, for a variety of reasons. It would have, according to Wired, given the company “access to 73% of U.S. households.”
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