Inside Gaming: DFS Leaders Join Forces as DraftKings, FanDuel Announce Merger

This week’s installment of Inside Gaming kicks off with this morning’s news that the two largest daily fantasy sports sites, DraftKings and FanDuel, have announced plans to merge. Also on tap this week, a casino in upstate New York will be opening sooner than expected, another in Macau reopened after being closed for eight years, and a group of Rhode Island illegal sports betting operators were indicted.

DFS Leaders DraftKings and FanDuel to Merge

There is breaking news this morning regarding the long-awaited merger of the two largest daily fantasy sports operators, DraftKings and FanDuel. Representatives of the two companies announced this morning they would be joining forces, culminating many months of negotiations and an even longer period of speculation regarding the possibility of a merger between them.

As David Purdum reports for ESPN, the merger still requires regulatory approval, meaning the sites will continue to operate distinctly until such approval is granted, likely not until the latter half of 2017. Indeed, both sites have already made it known they will each be running separately at least through the end of the 2017 National Football League season.

No new name for the merged company has been shared. Nor have terms of the deal been disclosed, although sources have described it to ESPN as “basically a 50/50 split between the two fantasy giants.” Each site will have three seats on the newly-merged company’s board, plus one independent director. Jason Robins, DraftKings CEO, will continue in the CEO role going forward, while FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles will be the chairman of the board.

Both were predictably sanguine about the two companies’ prospects moving forward. “Joining forces will allow us to truly realize the potention of our vision,” said Robins, while Eccles described the merger as presenting “a tremendous opportunity for us to further innovate and disrupt the sports industry.”

Rumors of a potential merger between the sites stretch back even before their explosion in popularity over a year ago and the subsequent legal battles taken on by both over the last 12 months. It was at the start of last year’s NFL season that speculation about the two sites’ possible futures began to receive widespread notice. Representatives of both sites continued to fend off suggestions of an impending alliance in June of this year, although many industry insiders believed a …

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