Early Thursday night, news broke that ESPN and MLB will be ending their current TV rights deal with each other following the upcoming 2025 season.
And while both sides technically had opt-outs in the agreement that they have now exercised, the breakup doesn’t seem to be as “mutual” as it was initially portrayed.
According to a new report from the CNN, the split between MLB and ESPN largely comes as the result of the network making the decision to terminate the deal. The report stands in stark contrast to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s memo to the league’s owners, which said that the breakup was “mutually agreed” to and placed blame on the network for not doing enough to promote the sport during their deal.
“We have not been pleased with the minimal coverage that MLB has received on ESPN’s platforms over the past several years outside of the actual live game coverage,” Manfred wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Athletic.
CNN’s Kyle Feldscher, however, reports that “a source with knowledge of ESPN’s approach to the negotiations disputed the idea that the split was mutual.
“The source told CNN that ESPN opted out of the contract and was surprised by Commissioner Rob Manfred’s note to MLB owners that the league and network had mutually agreed to end their relationship,” the report reads. “The source noted that ESPN had an opt-out clause in the contract and decided to exercise it on Thursday.”
If that’s the case, then it appears that MLB followed suit in exercising its own opt-out before placing the blame on ESPN while explaining the decision to the owners. ESPN’s public statement on the matter was notably much more diplomatic than MLB’s was, but also didn’t call it “mutual,” instead referring to it as “our decision to opt out.”
The mutual agreement went as follows:
ESPN: “We aren’t paying $550 million for this anymore.”
MLB: “OK” https://t.co/uDAnC6GgVG
— Alex Sherman (@sherman4949) February 21, 2025
In many ways, the idea of the split not being totally mutual is somewhat academic. It also perhaps helps explain why Manfred was willing to torch the network in the manner that he did in a memo that was conveniently leaked along with the news of the breakup.
Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, the result is the termination of a deal that reportedly paid the league $550 million per season, as well as its presence on ESPN, which has aired MLB games since 1990. As such, MLB now finds itself looking for a new national platform, while ESPN will be making its own adjustments to its summer programming beginning in 2026.
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