The time is mid-April 2026. FanDuel Sports Network stopped broadcasting and closed. The biggest sports network in America, which shows local games for 13 NBA teams and 7 NHL teams, has no more money. The team had already gone bankrupt in early 2025, missed payments to the Cardinals in December, and had not been able to find a buyer. Teams that had signed deals expecting to receive 20 to 30% of their annual income from broadcasting rights were told they would receive only a small portion of what they were owed.
The sports technology market is expected to grow from $34.25 billion in 2025 to $68.71 billion by 2030, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets in August 2025.
Both of those things are true at the same time. That is worth thinking about.
What Actually Killed the Old Model
In 2019, Diamond Sports Group, the company that would eventually become FanDuel Sports Network, paid $10.6 billion for a group of regional sports networks. The business case was simple: sports fans would not stop watching TV because they could only watch local games on cable. People were only keeping their subscription because of sports.
They were right about that. And they were wrong about everything else.
The number of people paying to watch TV fell by up to 40% in some areas over the next five years. The networks had to pay the teams a set amount for the rights to show the games. This was written into contracts when things were better. The maths stopped working. In March 2023, Diamond filed for bankruptcy. It had about $9 billion in debt. In November 2024, a court approved a plan to restructure the company, reducing its debt to about $200 million. The rebranded network didn’t pay the Cardinals the following month.
Nine MLB teams had already left before the spring 2026 season started.
“The RSN model is dead,” one industry insider told Cord Cutters News when the shutdown was announced. “The future is league-controlled and digital-first.” For two years, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred had been saying the league was ready to get involved. In 2026, the league was producing and distributing local broadcasts for six teams directly, paying clubs based on the money they actually made rather than fixed fees. Industry experts said that teams might initially receive only half of what the RSN contracts had promised.
Where the $34 Billion Actually Comes From
The sports technology market is real, but it encompasses many different things that have nothing to do with watching games on TV.
Stadium analytics is the fastest-growing sector, expected to grow at 17.2% annually until 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets. Verizon set up 500 radio nodes at the Caesars Superdome for Super Bowl LIX and moved 38 terabytes of traffic from the game without any problems. In 2025, Arsenal started using special software that made their website load much faster. Manchester United changed to a multilingual e-commerce engine in October 2024 and reported record online kit sales during launch week. The system matched live goal notifications with one-click purchase prompts, allowing fans to buy a jersey within 30 seconds of the ball hitting the net.
Wearable technology and performance analytics are also important. According to Global Growth Insights’ 2026 analysis, around 64% of professional athletes now use wearable devices. Catapult, WHOOP, and similar platforms collect information about your position and body data that shows when an injury is likely to happen. In June 2025, the NHL started using Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations to track players and analyse refereeing decisions.
According to Morgan Stanley Research, only 30% of sports organisations use technology to make their marketing campaigns more personal. In retail, the comparable figure is 92%. The gap is what the growth projections are measuring.
The Betting Integration Nobody Talks About Plainly
In 2026, the sports betting market generated $88 billion worldwide, according to Statista. In 2025, Americans legally wagered between $160 billion and $170 billion across 38 states, according to TrafficGuard’s market analysis. In 2025, 57.8% of the online betting market was made up of live in-play betting. As of early 2026, the FanDuel and DraftKings apps had over 14 million active users in the US every month.
DraftKings said that adding live betting features to a platform usually increases user engagement and time spent on the site. In 2024, Flutter Entertainment’s FanDuel app introduced a single-tap bet-slip feature and saw a 22% year-on-year increase in parlay construction. Machine-learning systems can now change live odds within 200 milliseconds of a game event, which is much quicker than the 30 to 60 seconds it took three years ago. According to a 2024 industry survey, operators using AI-driven dynamic pricing on live betting reported holding margins 14-18% higher.
This is how sports content and digital platforms work together. The game is what makes it fun. The money made from betting is what matters. The platform that controls both the stream and the bet captures the session value.
Asia-Pacific Is Where the Next Five Years Get Interesting
Depending on which report you read, somewhere between 33 and 35% of the sports technology market is in North America. Mordor Intelligence says that Asia-Pacific is growing faster than other regions, with an expected growth rate of 24.1% through to 2031. Cricket alone accounted for $7.17 billion in the global sports tech market in 2025, about 23% of the market. It is growing at 15.8% every year.
The reason is the infrastructure. Stadiums in Southeast Asia built in the last decade did not have to retrofit 5G into heritage masonry, as a 2024 London project did — a project that reportedly required months of cable routing to avoid damaging the building’s exterior and prompted cities to question whether they could host events without public funding for technology. New builds in the region started with connectivity as the backbone. The fan experience apps, the cashier-less concessions, the real-time biometric displays — these are easier to set up when you do not have to install fibre-optic cables behind nineteenth-century stone.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America is expected to lead to a big increase in the number of new betting accounts being registered. That event, more than any market report, will show in real time how much of the sports technology growth story depends on a single live moment pulling people into a digital ecosystem they then stay in.
How Decentralised Platforms Fit Into This
Most of what has been described above involves a centralised operator — a league, a broadcaster, a sportsbook — sitting between the fan and the event, capturing the data, taking the margin, and deciding what the experience looks like.
Dexsport is built on a different assumption. Smart contracts hold betting funds and settle automatically when verified results are received from external sources. No operator is making a judgment call on your withdrawal. The rules and odds are in the contract before you place the bet. Some of the money generated by the platform is used to buy back and remove tokens from circulation. This means the token’s value is tied to how much the platform is used, not to people trying to make money by buying and selling tokens.
The centralised model built the sports technology market. The decentralised model is what some people are creating next. It will be interesting to see if this model scales as planned.
