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 Bally Sports has decided not to pay the Diamondbacks and will return the TV rights to the MLB on June 30th.
Bally Sports still has to decide if it will pay three more teams over the next few weeks. This comes as the Judge has ordered Diamond Sports to pay up or lose their TV rights.
The teams that are still at risk this month are the Twins and the Guardians. These teams are owed payments by the end of June. Lastly, Bally Sports has until July 15th to pay the Reds.
If Bally Sports fails to make payments to any of these teams it 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 all three of these MLB teams that it owes money two and returning the TV rights to the MLB.
Earlier this month Bally Sports’ parent company Diamond Sports, filled in the court saying that they would not pay Raycom for ACC college football and basketball games. This means the ACC will need a new TV partner this fall for the games that ESPN did not pick up with their TV partner Raycom.
Now it seems that both Raycom, who produces these ACC games, and Bally Sports have agreed to go their own ways, according to a court filing. No word yet on where these ACC games will end up in the future. We will have to wait for Raycom to make a new deal to air these sporting events.
Ending the ACC contract frees up money for Bally Sports to pay other contracts like the ones for MLB teams. For now we will have to wait and see what Bally Sports does next.