The easy part for PENN Entertainment was signing the 10-year deal with ESPN to rebrand its Barstool Sportsbook into ESPN BET later this year.
The hard part will be hitting 20% market share by 2027, as that's the goal PENN CEO Jay Snowden laid out during his company's earnings call this month. Currently, the market is dominated by FanDuel and DraftKings. In fact, those two — and to a lesser extent Caesars, BetMGM, and the current incarnation of Barstool — accounted for more than 92% of the gross gaming revenue for online sportsbooks in the third quarter of 2022, according to numbers compiled by Vixio. Barstool's share represented a little more than 4% of that number.
Add in Fanatics launching its sportsbook, and it's clear that achieving 20% market share for ESPN BET is going to be no small feat.
So can it be done? Lloyd Danzig, the managing partner of the New York-based Sharp Alpha Advisors, declined to predict, but he does see a pathway for PENN to make the most of this opportunity.