Diamond Sports Group Emerges From Chapter 11 as Main Street Sports

Paul, Weiss represented Diamond Sports Group, the nation’s largest owner of regional sports networks, in its successful chapter 11 process. The company emerged as Main Street Sports Group, with its outstanding debt trimmed from nearly $9 billion to $200 million. It will continue to serve fans under the FanDuel Sports Network name and retains its broad naming rights for FanDuel’s 16 regional sports networks. It will be home to a combined 29 NBA, NHL and MLB teams.

Diamond filed for chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas in March 2023 and subsequently entered into a restructuring support agreement with the company’s creditors to eliminate the vast majority of its outstanding debt, separate its business from its parent company Sinclair Broadcast Group, and position the company to expand its direct-to-consumer offerings to address consumer movement away from traditional cable and satellite offerings. In January 2024, Diamond settled an adversary proceeding against Sinclair, with Sinclair agreeing to separate business operations and provide approximately $495 million to support the restructuring.

Over the following months, Diamond strengthened its business by reaching revised multi-year rights agreements with team and league partners, carriage agreements with major distribution partners, branding partnership with FanDuel and a commercial agreement with Amazon. In approving the reorganization plan in November, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez described the proceedings as “a model of the way cases, in my opinion, should be run.”

The Paul, Weiss team included restructuring partners Brian Hermann, Joseph Graham and Lauren Bilzin; litigation partners William Clareman, Gregory Laufer, Randy Luskey, Andre Bouchard, Alison Benedon and Matthew Stachel, and counsel Yotam Barkai, Jonathan Hurwitz and Audrey Paquet; corporate partners Jeffrey Marell, Charles Pesant, David Huntington, Megan Spelman, Kristiina Leskinen, Hilary Christian and Jason Tyler, and counsel Mary-Ann Awada and David Sobel; tax partner Brian Krause; executive compensation partner Rebecca Coccaro and counsel Jake Glazeski; intellectual property and entertainment partner Chuck Googe and intellectual property partner Brianna van Kan; real estate partners Peter Fisch and Ida Nowaid and counsel Ruobing Chen; and antitrust counsel Todd Hahn.