Pablo Torre: ESPN ‘let over a billion dollars walk out the door’ in sports podcasting talent

ESPN is never going to bat a thousand.

No network does. The idea that the Worldwide Leader can do no wrong is a fantasy you won’t find in any sober corner of the sports media landscape, even if it has a long track record of smart, forward-thinking moves. It’s also made a few missteps, the kind that, in hindsight, look like they could have been avoided. One of the bigger ones, at least in the current media landscape, is how little priority the network placed on sports podcasting.

Pablo Torre frames that decision inside a much bigger balancing act, one ESPN’s been trying to pull off for years.

“When [John] Skipper was president, they were always balancing the fundamental conflict of we’re paying billions of dollars to leagues, and also operating the biggest newsroom in sports media,” Torre said last week in an appearance on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast. “There was always just this very difficult dance that anybody who knows anything about the media business is trying to sort of thread the needle of. And now over time, I would say as the cable bundle has, frankly, become what is self-evident — the luxury good that is reporting in journalism has been more and more endangered, if not almost extinct.”

You can see what he means in the changes over the past decade. ESPN The Magazine shuttering, ESPN.com evolving into something materially different, and audience-building efforts increasingly shifting to social media personalities like Katie Feeney. Which is to say that Torre’s point is less about nostalgia and more about how traditional journalism and the creator economy now have to coexist, often uneasily, under the same roof.

The same push-and-pull dynamic exists in other areas of the company. Investigative reporters like Don Van Natta Jr. still produce high-impact work, but their value to ESPN’s business model is harder to quantify. The same goes for in-house podcast talent. In both cases, Torre argues, the network had assets that fit the future of sports media but haven’t necessarily treated them as core to its strategy.

“ESPN, also, is operating at such a level of billions and billions of dollars in TV rights deals — the most valuable properties in sports and television — that when it comes to you, mention Zach Lowe, who is the greatest at NBA podcasting,” Torre continued. “So, if you think about Zach, and Bill Simmons, and Ryen Russillo, and Dan Le Batard, and Colin Cowherd, and throw me in somewhere in the rotation if you want. But just down the list, that’s Meadowlark, that’s The Ringer, that’s The Volume, that’s some other stuff that’s emerging. If you were to collect all those guys and do the math on that, ESPN let legitimately over a billion dollars walk out the door.

“Now, they missed, I would argue, the future of sports podcasting that was already in-house. But, the economics of why they let it go is that it was still fractional, compared to their actual interests. And so, everything that I think about investigative journalism, once I see it through the lens of podcasting, that was a deliberate — and maybe it was uninformed — but I would say it’s still a mathematically justifiable choice about what their business really is.”

“ESPN, legitimately, let over a billion dollars walk out the door. They missed, I would argue, the future of sports podcasting that was already in-house.”@PabloTorre discusses the business of ESPN with @maxwelltani and @semaforben: pic.twitter.com/yyCutnnErV

— Semafor (@semafor) August 11, 2025

It’s not that ESPN ignored podcasting entirely; it’s that the medium was never core to the business in the way live sports are. In an environment where billion-dollar rights deals drive the strategy, podcasts and investigative journalism can start to look more like nice-to-haves than essential pillars.

The math makes sense. But so does wondering if, in chasing one future, ESPN let another one walk right out the door.