Barstool Sports is set to lay off 25% of its employees after founder Dave Portnoy reacquired the company from Penn Entertainment. Around 100 of its roughly 430 employees will be fired, the New York Post reported. The company gained 300 employees after being purchased three and a half years ago.
“I’ve been very clear. Anybody that’s paid attention, we are going to have layoffs and cuts, and they’ve started and it sucks,” Portnoy said on Barstool Sports Radio according to the Post. “And people who know me from the beginning [know] I hate firing people. You can be incompetent, not work and I generally don’t fire because I hate it so much. It’s the worst thing to f–king do.”
“Having said that, we’re in a position it’s a no-brainer. It’s not like I have that moral—well, you can’t do it because nobody will have jobs. We’ll all not have jobs. So we have to get back to a break-even thing. We’re losing a lot and it sucks.”
Earlier in August, Portnoy uploaded a video of himself walking through the office, cursing about how empty it was at 9:45 am.
Portnoy re-purchased the company from Penn for $1. Many of the employees being cut are remote employees, such as Will Burge, a podcast host based in Cleveland, OH.
He founded the company in 2003, sold a majority of it to The Chernin Group in 2016, and finalized the sale of it to Penn National Gaming in 2020 for $551 million. Penn had purchased a 36% stake in the company for $163 million and agreed to a deal which valued the company to be $450 million. It obtained the right to the company logo which it put on various products. At the time, Barstool’s website site had an estimated 66 million monthly unique visitors and had a revenue of nearly $100 million in 2019.
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Penn’s hope for the purchase was that its own gambling business would profit by being affiliated with the Barstool brand, but instead it lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Penn has decided to attempt the same strategy with the ESPN brand.
“I don’t know what the future is. We’re willing to adapt, try anything. But I think this deal for Barstool, why I’m excited about it, it ensures we’ll be around for another 20 years, 30 years,” Portnoy told FOX Business. “For the first time in forever, we don’t have to watch what we say, how we talk, what we do. It’s back to the pirate ship. By the way, I’m never going to sell Barstool Sports. Ever.”
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