Penn National Gaming Buys Stake In Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy Announces

The influence of sports betting in media was on full display Wednesday morning, as Barstool Sports announced a deal that could change the landscape of both worlds.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy on Twitter officially revealed a partnership with Penn National Gaming. The Wall Street Journal broke the news early Wednesday morning, reporting Penn agreed to buy a 36 percent stake in the company for $163 million. The deal puts Penn’s overall valuation of Barstool at $450 million. With the deal, Penn becomes Barstool’s exclusive gaming partner for 40 years, the company announced.

In his video announcing the deal, Portnoy pointed to the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to repeal a federal ban on sports betting as the time he started really thinking about a deal. Along with CEO Erika Nardini, Barstool set out to find a partner, nearly 20 years after Portnoy started Barstool Sports as a Boston-based newspaper with strong gambling roots.

“We have a deep history of gambling,” Portnoy said in the video. “It’s real. You can touch it. You can feel it. Unlike a lot of our competitors who are just new to this and just throwing people at this to grab this market — not us. It’s been part of what we’ve done for two decades.”

Barstool obviously has grown exponentially since its beginning, eventually transitioning from the hard newspaper to one of the more popular “sports” websites in the country with a heavy emphasis on comedy. Barstool in recent years has become one of the industry leaders in podcasts. At the moment, two Barstool Sports podcasts rank in the top 50 of all podcasts in America, including the “Pardon My Take” podcast, which is continuously one of if not the top-ranked sports podcast in the world. The Chernin Group bought a majority stake in Barstool in 2016.

Since the Supreme Court decision, Barstool has appeared to ramp up its sports betting content even more.

“Nobody knows the space better than us. Nobody,” Portnoy added. “We just needed a company with a shared vision. That vision is Penn National Gaming. They have one of the biggest infrastructures in the country for gambling. They have sports tracks, they have casinos, they’re all over the country. … Together, we’re going to create an omnipresent approach to gambling, on-premise, off-premise: Barstool casinos, bars, pizza places, you name it, we’re going to build it. All fueled by the Barstool media engine.”

The company isn’t without its controversies and it’s a polarizing brand, to say the least. But it’s hard to deny the obvious brand power and audience loyalty possessed by the company especially given the magnitude of this deal.