A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Sport newsletter with Alex Sherman, which brings you the biggest news and exclusive interviews from the worlds of sports business and media. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. All deals, big or small, need a willing buyer and a willing seller. Paramount is preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, CNBC reported several weeks ago . The question for Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav and his board will be whether to accept Paramount’s bid or to wait and move forward with a planned splitting of the company into two – a linear cable networks-driven entity called Discovery Global and a studio and streaming service firm to be called Warner Bros. If Paramount and WBD agree to a transaction, it would create a media and sports behemoth, bringing together TNT Sports and CBS Sports. March Madness would be united under one corporate roof. While a combined company still wouldn’t have NBA rights, after Warner Bros. Discovery failed to secure them in the league’s most recent TV deal beginning this upcoming season, it would have the NFL, MLB, NHL, some college football, UFC, NASCAR and much more. In other words, it would be a sports giant not quite the size of ESPN, but pretty close to NBCUniversal. A tie-up would be enormous in scale and in dollars. Warner Bros. Discovery is currently trading at around $19 a share, giving the company a market capitalization of $47 billion. Add another $30 billion in net debt and an additional takeover premium, and we’re talking about a transaction that could reach $90 billion. My colleague David Faber reported last month a bid could come in between $22 and $24 a share. I’m sure Zaslav will push for even more. Zaslav’s leverage is that he and the board believe there could be a bidding war for the Warner Bros. assets that will lift the value so high as to make Paramount’s bid for the entire company seem undervalued. Zaslav has told others that companies like Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Comcast could be interested in the studios and streaming business, according to people familiar with the matter, and he might be right. HBO and Warner Bros. studio would fit nicely with any of those companies. Paramount probably wants to avoid a bidding war, which could force the world’s second-wealthiest person and would-be-backer Larry Ellison’s hand into making an aggressive bid for the company before it splits into two. Companies such as Netflix, Apple and Amazon aren’t interested in owning legacy media assets like cable networks. Paramount, on the other hand, would have synergies by clumping its cable networks together with Warner’s for added distribution heft with pay TV providers. A combined company could keep the networks for the cash flow and the sports rights, or it could eventually split them off like Warner Bros. Discovery had planned. There’s another reason Paramount may want to move early, I’m told. The Skydance-Paramount merger ended up taking longer than expected after the FCC dragged its feet on approving a deal until after a “60 Minutes” settlement yielded $16 million to President Donald Trump . During that time, I’m told Paramount’s assets have degraded in value. This isn’t a surprise. The company’s linear TV assets have long been in a state of decline. Executives haven’t been able to move forward with strategic business decisions given the state of the company was in limbo. Some of those executives, including former co-CEOs Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins , aren’t even with the company anymore. We’ll find out the extent of the depreciation of value when Paramount reports its third-quarter earnings in November. But that won’t really matter if Paramount strikes a deal with WBD. The whole narrative of the company’s future will be different. I asked NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell what he thought of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison ‘s ambition to grow the company so quickly after closing the merger. “It’s exciting for us because it’s showing one of our big partners who is attempting to transform itself right before our eyes,” said Goodell in an exclusive interview last week. “I think they’re recognizing the value of content.” Goodell has reason to be thrilled. Last year, Paramount, which owns CBS Sports, looked like a weakling compared to its competitors. Just as the NBA pulled out from its media rights deal with WBD given its diminished scale relative to rivals, one could have imagined Goodell making the same choice with Paramount. But if Paramount bulks up with a WBD combo, that company will have a huge balance sheet and a very wealthy part-owner in Larry Ellison. The biggest wild card is Comcast’s NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC (at least, until January, when CNBC will be spun off as part of Versant). A company like Netflix doesn’t want Paramount to buy Warner Bros. Discovery on the cheap. A company like NBCUniversal doesn’t want Paramount to buy WBD at all because it directly affects its very existence. Pushing Paramount and Warner together would make NBCUniversal and Peacock even more subscale than it already is. That could make NBCUniversal a less desirable home, in the future, for major sports and entertainment talent that want to maximize viewership. Would a sports league want to put programming on Peacock, or a combined Paramount+ and HBO Max? The latter would have far more viewers. Would Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and soon-to-be co-CEO Mike Cavanagh make a competing bid for all of WBD? Does that even make sense while NBCUniversal is spinning off almost all of its cable networks? Is there another partner out there that NBCUniversal could acquire or merge with? Zaslav has begged for big media consolidation for years. We may finally be on the verge of seeing some dramatic action. *** Speaking of Versant, I’m told the company is actively in the market to sell SportsEngine. That’s the company’s youth sports team management platform. Youth sports is a scorching hot market. Versant may be able to better use the money from a sale for its core strategic goals, such as building up live sports rights and acquiring businesses that bolster finance and news. On the record With Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten … To no one’s surprise, the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers are back in the MLB playoffs. I spoke with Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten from his home perch at Dodger stadium about his assessment of the season, his thoughts on the Savannah Bananas, how the Dodgers plan to work with MLB on a nationalized local media package after 2028, and if he’d like to be the league’s commissioner when Rob Manfred ‘s contract ends. “Hell no,” Kasten told me. “I can absolutely tell you that won’t happen. I should be retired already.” I also asked him to assess the job Manfred’s done as head of the league. The MLB and the MLB Players Association may be on a collision course to a work stoppage after next season, when the collective bargaining agreement expires. “Rob has had a lot of challenges. I told him when he took the job, it’s a lousy job, right? Because you have 30 knuckleheads like me barking at you every day with some new complaint,” Kasten said. “He also had some difficult cards to play … a Covid thing that could easily have erased our entire season. And yet we came through that. We have had labor things. We’ve had the dislocation of the TV thing. So these are challenges that are not on the ordinary – challenges that I think he didn’t expect or anticipate when he came in. He did lead us through all of those. But it wouldn’t surprise me if that has led to his early decision to leave [when his contract is up], because this has been an awful lot for anyone to try to take in the last couple of years.” You can watch our entire conversation here . And if you listen here (and follow the CNBC Sport podcast if you prefer the audio version), you can hear a bonus conversation I had this week with Mike Foss , ESPN’s senior vice president of sport studio and entertainment. Foss and I chatted about the evolution of ESPN’s studio shows, including SportsCenter, and if they’re more or less important to the company than they were 25 years ago. Foss grew up in the TV production industry. His dad worked for ESPN. Foss told me would sometimes accompany him on productions because he was home schooled (and one of nine kids). Now he has to manage some of the industry’s biggest personalities, including Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee . We also discussed what he’s thinking about in terms of a replacement for “Around the Horn,” the longtime ESPN show that was canceled earlier this year, and why ESPN won’t just bring back the old theme music from the old SportsCenter (you know: this music ). CNBC Sport highlight reel The best of CNBC Sport from the past week: Another Versant nugget – it has expanded its multiyear media rights deal with the WNBA. The new deal begins in 2026 and includes at least 50 WNBA games annually and portions of playoff and finals games during select years, the company said. The latest agreement expands upon a previous package between the WNBA and Versant’s USA Network signed in 2024. Amazon Prime Video has struck a deal with FanDuel that will allow users to check up on bets (and how odds are changing) while watching NBA games. Amazon Prime Video is one of the NBA’s new media partners. Those games begin later this month. Swimming legend Michael Phelps spoke with CNBC’s Dom Chu at the Ryder Cup this weekend about how to tap into peak performance, no matter the activity. Nike shares surged after the company reported earnings that topped estimates, but the company warned sales will likely fall off during the holiday season, reports CNBC’s Gabrielle Fonrouge . Contessa’s Corner Hi everyone! It’s been a rough week for DraftKings and FanDuel parent Flutter. Shares of each company plummeted more than 10% on Tuesday after Kalshi launched a knockoff parlay product allowing its customers to “build your combo.” Parlays were supposed to be the product that protected the sportsbooks because gamblers love them, even though they really favor the house. Kalshi is now copying what works for the sportsbooks and putting it to work on its own platform. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told a joint SEC-CFTC panel Tuesday, “We’re doing around 40 billion of annualized volume and becoming a meaningful player in the retail derivatives markets.” In gambling, that’s called “handle” – the amount of money wagered. But don’t call it gambling. Mansour insists it’s not, because the CFTC regulates events contracts. Piper Sandler estimates about a quarter of Kalshi’s business is coming through its partnership with Robinhood, and HOOD shares are soaring, up more than 270% year to date. Robinhood Predictions Markets surpassed 4 billion event contracts since launching earlier this year, CEO Vlad Tenev boasted this week on X. More than 2 billion of those came in the third quarter, he said, when the platform launched pro and college football markets, in addition to crypto economics, financials, culture and other sports. DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has told me he’s interested in getting into predictions markets — and shrugged off the competitive threat. Shareholders are probably paying closer attention these days. On Tuesday the CFTC issued a letter , essentially warning Kashi that the sports events contracts are not yet an accepted asset class. Lawsuits by tribes, states and other regulators pose a risk, and the trading platforms should prepare contingencies and update their customers, investors and others of those plans, wrote the CFTC. Not to be left out, Sleeper, an app that says it has 10 million users, sued the CFTC this week for not approving its application to take part. It says it’s missing out on the crucial NFL season. One more note: I’ve got something special in store for you all about a little trip I’m taking. Stay tuned for that in next week’s newsletter! The big number: 71,409,421 That’s the total attendance for MLB’s regular season this year. That marks in-person growth for three straight seasons. Shorter games are helping with both TV ratings and attendance. TV ratings soared this year, with national TV games up more than 10% from last year. Quote of the week “We have the worst leadership in the world.” — That’s quite a statement from Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier , who lambasted WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert this week in a four-minute prepared statement. The WNBA is gearing up for a potential labor dispute as its CBA expires at the end of the year. The players have been vocal for several years about how underpaid they are (the highest annual WNBA salary is currently $252,450.) Collier co-founded upstart women’s 3-on-3 league Unrivaled last year. Her husband, Alex Bazzell , is Unrivaled’s president. More from Collier: “Year after year, the only thing that remains consistent is the lack of accountability from our leaders. The league has a buzzword that they rolled out as a talking point for the CBA as to why they can’t pay the players what we’re worth – that word is sustainability. But what’s truly unsustainable is keeping a good product on the floor while allowing officials to lose control of games. Fans see it every night. Coaches, both winning and losing, point it out every night in pre- and post-game media. And leadership just issues fines and looks the other way. They ignore the issues that everyone inside the game is begging them to fix. That is negligence.” Engelbert responded to Collier in a statement . “I am disheartened by how Napheesa characterized our conversations and league leadership, but even when our perspectives differ, my commitment to the players and to this work will not waver,” Engelbert said. “I have the utmost respect for Napheesa Collier and for all the players in the WNBA. Together we have all worked tirelessly to transform this league. My focus remains on ensuring a bright future for the players and the WNBA, including collaborating on how we continue to elevate the game.” Around the league Many WNBA players immediately jumped in to support Collier’s comments against Englebert, ESPN reports . Tickets to the 2026 FIFA World Cup are officially on sale . I told you last week YouTube TV and NBCUniversal were headed toward a potential blackout. Well, the two sides reached a tentative extension that will keep NBCUniversal programming on the virtual distribution TV service for the time being.
