PENN has not indicated what the new name for the sportsbooks will be or how they will be different, including whether use of ESPN’s vaunted name and image would be involved. A company spokesman said 19 of PENN’s 32 retail sportsbooks carried the brand, which he said is in the process of being removed from all. PENN has 43 properties, but not all of them are in legal sports betting states, and not all of the ones in sports betting states adopted the Barstool name. A quieter corollary of the deal, in which PENN shed its ownership of the Barstool Sports media company, involves the national gaming company removing signage and other references to Barstool from its retail sportsbooks. Most of the focus of PENN’s recent mega-deal with ESPN has been on the rebranding of its online sports betting site, with ESPN BET to replace Barstool Sportsbook as the platform used by mobile customers sometime next month.
PENN Entertainment invested millions of dollars in recent years creating or redoing retail sportsbooks to carry the Barstool brand, and now it will be spending thousands more to remove that identity from its casinos.
