The league just signed the biggest TV deal in its history: a massive $76 billion agreement that will run for 11 years starting in 2025-26. While fans were busy crying over the end of TNT’s NBA era, ESPN’s parent Disney was locking in its slice of the pie alongside NBCUniversal and Amazon, putting games on ABC, ESPN’s upcoming streaming service, Peacock, and Prime Video. But while all eyes were on the media-rights headlines, ESPN was quietly brewing a whole other money-making recipe. And now, a former employee is here to spill exactly what was cooking.

While chatting with Semafor , former ESPN employee Pablo Torre broke down how the network managed to save a billion dollars, even if it meant missing out on something big. He called it “ sort of like observation around the economy of

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