Recently Bally Sports’ parent company Diamond Sports, let the deadline to pay the Padres pass and decided to return the media rights back to the MLB. Now it looks like as many as five more teams may also get their TV rights back as Bally Sports considers not making payments to four teams. This comes as the Judge has ordered Diamond Sports to pay up or lose their TV rights.
Now it seems that Bally Sports’ parent company Diamond Sports, is considering not making payments to four of them. The teams that are at risk this month are the Twins, Diamondbacks, Guardians, and the Rangers. Lastly, Bally Sports has until July 15th to pay the Reds.
According to reports from Sports Business Journal is reporting that the Rangers are owed their payment by tomorrow. After that, Diamond Sports has three more teams, all owed payments by July 1st. These teams are the Guardians, Twins, and Diamondbacks. If Bally Sports’ fails to make a payment to the teams, they will lose TV rights to that team for the rest of the season.
This would return the TV rights to the MLB. This comes as Diamond Sports ask the judge to clarify if they can get refunds for games they already paid for after they let the TV rights return to the MLB.
As we first reported last week, Bally Sports has asked the Judge to clarify if they could be paid back by the teams for any unaired MLB games they had already paid for.
Here is what Bally Sports wants the Judge to add to his ruling.
In the event one or more of the Agreements is rejected or terminated and the Debtors cease broadcasting a Club’s games, the respective Club shall pay to the Debtors all amounts previously received by such Club that are attributable to content that would have been received by the Debtors after the effective date of the rejection or termination of such Agreement, calculated by dividing the total rights fees due under such Agreement for the 2023 season by the total number of games that would have been delivered following the effective date of the rejection or termination of such Agreement.
This request for clarification is far from confirmation that Bally Sports will skip the payments to these teams and end TV rights. However, it does show that there is serious consideration of not paying 4 of these MLB teams that it owes money two and returning the TV rights to the MLB.
According to the Sports Business Journal, the team that is most likely not to be paid is the Twins. According to reports, all of these teams have unfavorable contracts for Bally Sports. The Twins contract is not just unfavorable but is coming up soon, making them the mostly likely to be dropped if Bally Sports was looking to cut costs.