Last week’s news that the Saudis, alongside Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, would be taking Electronic Arts private for $55 billion elicited the predictable hysterical reactions—from fretting over what it means for EA’s 14,500 employees to outrage over the source of the money. EA Games, after all, is one of the largest video game publishers in the world, with franchises like Madden, FIFA (now called EA Sports FC), The Sims, Need for Speed, etcetera. A leveraged buyout led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) was never going to be popular. But it’s worth keeping an open mind about what EA Sports, the company’s biggest division, could become once freed from the pressures of a public market.

As an analyst covering the intersection of sports and gaming, I find the long-term opportunity obvious. Gaming has redefined sports: Madden and FIFA have sold hundreds of millions of copies, and are massive sources of recurring revenue for EA. Meanwhile, the line between video games and the sports they simulate has blurred—games are increasingly treated like spectator sports, and sports themselves have become ever more gamified. Between July 2024 and July 2025, approximately 57 million adults participated in fantasy sports across the U.S. and Canada, while about 66 million bet on sports, with the number increasing year by year. (Unsurprisingly, nearly half of all fantasy sports players also engage in sports betting.)

Could the next step be to meld sports gaming with live sports? Matthew Ball, one of the smartest media analysts out there, recently argued that most people have been looking at the EA deal too narrowly. “I imagine the goal here is partly to buy/distribute traditional sports, and then augment it with interactivity, and surround it with myriad other community features,” he wrote. “That’s a very long game, and a costly one that few can play (Netflix, Amazon, Apple). It also has massive upside with clear-enough business cases.”

EA has already invested heavily in merging the virtual and live worlds over the last decade, Ball pointed out. The EA Sports Mobile App, for example, helps users follow favorite players and teams while integrating fantasy elements and providing real-time scores. And EA Sports’s player network of 265 million users is precisely the type of young, hyper-engaged audience that leagues like the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and the Premier League need to reach. More than half of U.S. gamers also watch live sports, per YouGov.

Sports media executives know they need to do more to engage and monetize fans as the number of cable subscriptions declines (on path to fall below 50 million households in a few years) and broadcast loses its audience (less than 20 percent of all households now engage with broadcast programming, according to Nielsen). Those secular trends explain why Roger Goodell brought an NFL game to YouTube, why Adam Silver likes to talk about the value of TikTok highlight clips, and why MLS struck a deal with EA Sports to bring four live games into EA’s virtual arena. It’s why Jimmy Pitaro brought gambling and fantasy into ESPN’s streaming app, and why Amazon’s Jay Marine struck a deal with FanDuel. Meanwhile, the percentage of time spent with video games has only increased.

Of all the companies that should be exploring a partnership with EA, or at least those with complementary assets, it’s hard to think of one better positioned than ESPN. Bob Iger has repeatedly said over the last year that he doesn’t see a world in which ESPN or ABC will be spun off under his leadership. But that leadership is coming to an end at the end of 2026. Analysts like Rich Greenfield see an opportunity for ESPN to be spun off with some debt, giving Disney the opportunity to explore buying new assets that may be more critical to its future. Pitaro, who has led ESPN for the last seven years, also comes from the world of gaming—he oversaw Disney’s gaming division before moving into his current role.

ESPN, of course, maintains the largest number of sports rights in the U.S., and has corresponding rights for a number of popular EA Sports titles, including Madden and College Football. EA’s sports games make up around 90 percent of all play time across EA’s portfolio of games, per Ball, which also includes popular titles like Battlefield and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. And as EA Sports president Cam Weber recently told the FT, there’s no question that younger consumers want more interactivity in their viewing experiences. So why not simulcast ESPN games inside of Madden?

We’ve already seen similar crossover events in video games. In 2019, director J.J. Abrams appeared in Fortnite to debut an exclusive clip for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The following year, Travis Scott performed live to 12.3 million Fortnite players in a first-of-its-kind metaverse experience. Although encoding live-action sports in an environment like EA’s app is a much more extensive process, the technology bringing these hybrid events to life is only getting better.

Perhaps the most pertinent question for executives like Pitaro and Wilson—who was once considered a candidate to succeed Iger—is how video games can become a bigger part of sports fandom, and vice versa. Betting, fantasy, and social elements are part of the journey, but the real fan experience hinges on live sports, where they passively engage, and video games, where they actively engage. No, TV isn’t going away, but it will be augmented by more interactive experiences every year. Now that EA is private and there’s a possible ESPN spinoff on the horizon, combining the two feels less far-fetched than ever. EA’s executives couldn’t be clearer about wanting to bring more live sports into their portfolio, and Pitaro’s ambitions for a hyper-interactive sports future are written on his sleeve.

Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday,

John