Another round of layoffs has gotten underway at Facebook’s parent company Meta. Among those being let go are three executives in sports-related roles.
Meta’s Director of Global Sports Partnerships Rob Shaw, Director of Sports Partnerships Kevin Cote and Dev Sethi all confirmed in LinkedIn posts on Wednesday that their positions had been eliminated.
Shaw and Cote had been at Meta and Facebook since 2014, while Sethi joined the company in 2015.
“Those years have been full of innovation and transition within the sports industry, and it was my great pleasure to be a leading advocate for how technology can bring people closer to their passion of sports,” Shaw wrote. Before Facebook, he was the vice president of content and media at Bloomberg Sports.
“I was fortunate to be surrounded by top notch people, and while it is emotional to say goodbye, I have no doubt our paths will cross again soon,” Cote wrote. He noted that working with various athletes, teams and leagues worldwide on business and social needs, partnerships with high-profile athletes, original programming, live sports and working on athlete partnerships were some of the highlights of his career.
Sethi expressed pride in the work he did at Meta and was thankful to work in a position he could put his heart and soul into.
“I’ve been lucky to marry my passion for sports with my professions for years now, and my hope is to continue that marriage in whatever lies ahead,” he wrote.
The shedding of these jobs is part of a larger swath of cuts at the social media giant. Some 20,000 jobs at the company are being eliminated, and that dates back to November when Meta laid off its head of media partnerships and regional leaders in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Meta at one time had rights to broadcast MLB games live on Facebook. The company has partnered with leagues like the NFL and the NBA, as well as the UFC to bring sports-related content into Web3 and the Metaverse. But the focus has shifted away from live sports rights into AI and alternate reality.
