ESPN Bet will go down as ESPN’s signature failure

Move over, Mobile ESPN. You’re no longer the biggest failure in the history of the Worldwide Leader in Sports.

That title now belongs to ESPN Bet, which will come to an end on Dec. 1 as the network and Penn Entertainment announced on Thursday that they have mutually agreed to end their partnership. The announcement comes less than two years after the ESPN-branded sportsbook first launched as a part of a 10-year, $1.5 billion agreement in which the Disney-owned cable channel replaced Barstool Sports as the face of Penn’s mobile operation.

Unsurprisingly, many were quick to question the ethics involved with the biggest sports network on the planet actively promoting its own branded sportsbook. But while it took nearly two years for that conflict of interest to become so apparent that ESPN’s Get Up morning show had to literally erase an ESPN Bet banner from its screen while covering breaking news involving the arrests of an NBA player and head coach on gambling-related charges, the product’s shortcomings had already become evident.

Unreal scene from ESPN Get Up this AM.

They’re talking the FBI’s arrests for NBA Sports Gambling. Mike Greenberg explains how ESPN used to shun sports gambling…while an ESPN BET promo is on the screen.

The graphics team realizes the disconnect and takes the chyron down lol pic.twitter.com/ICCvyhJHPA

— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) October 23, 2025

Conflicts of interest aside, ESPN Bet never found its footing in the sportsbook space. It’s not that it was a bad product — it just wasn’t anything special. And it didn’t take long to learn that Stephen A. Smith and Mike Greenberg-endorsed parlays and profit boosts wouldn’t help Penn close the gap on the DraftKings and FanDuels of the world.

Three months after ESPN Bet’s Nov. 2023 launch, Penn’s stock tumbled on the news that the rollout had lost $334 million. By May 2024, Pat McAfee was openly mocking the state of the sportsbook on ESPN’s own airwaves as it became evident the product was facing an uphill battle.

Outside of its initial launch, in which it lured customers with boilerplate bonus bets, it’s hard to think of a time in which ESPN Bet elicited any optimism. As of May 2025, the sportsbook laid claim to just 3.2 percent market share outside of Nevada, trailing DraftKings (37 percent), FanDuel (35 percent), BetMGM (8 percent) and Caesars (5 percent). That prompted at least one analyst to deem 2025 a “make or break” year for ESPN Bet, as Disney reportedly possessed the ability to opt out of the 10-year agreement at the end of 2026.

Based on Thursday’s announcement, it certainly seems like ESPN decided that the negative publicity associated with having its name attached to the fifth-place (at best) sportsbook wasn’t worth the annual $150 million payments. Especially when considering the recent string of sports betting-related controversies, which critics were quick to throw back in ESPN’s face.

In many ways, ESPN Bet was far more of a failure for Penn than it was for ESPN, which was merely being compensated for licensing its name and actively promoting the sportsbook. Effectively, the sportsbook operator just repeated the same strategy it tried to run with Barstool and once again found itself coming up short.

The general public, however, doesn’t typically make such distinctions — which is more than fair considering ESPN’s willingness to lease its likeness and brand to the product. After all, it’s not like the network is abandoning taking sports gambling revenue altogether; it’s now just striking deals in which it doesn’t have to be the face of the operation.

While it’s inevitable that any company as big as Disney is going to have successes and failures, it’s hard to think of a project that fell on its face as quickly as ESPN Bet did. That includes the network’s previous attempt at its own branded cell phone, which fortunately didn’t live long enough for anybody to place any bets from.