How close did ESPN come to losing Jimmy Pitaro? According to CNBC”s Alex Sherman, the network’s chairman was very unhappy at Disney under Bob Chapek’s reign.
Pitaro is seen as a strong candidate to replace Bob Iger at the end of the Disney CEO’s current contract. But Sherman writes that at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Pitaro had become “so demoralized” with Chapek’s attempts to reorganize the Walt Disney Company that “he contemplated leaving the company”.
Under Chapek, ESPN executives were cut off from doing deals directly with the leagues the network carried or wanted to carry. Sherman describes the process as becoming stuffed with “layers of bureaucracy.”
The story describes Bob Chapek as being emboldened by the absence of Iger, who was his boss before Iger’s first retirement. Iger had regularly dismissed the idea of rethinking what ESPN could be or spinning it off along with other legacy media properties. He saw ESPN’s potential as a standalone digital business. He and Pitaro even pitched the radical idea of ESPN+ morphing into a “hub of all streaming sports” that would require deals with leagues and competing networks.
Sherman reached out to Pitaro for comment on his reporting. The ESPN Chairman reportedly declined.
