Fox Sports will purchase a 25 percent equity share in the New York Racing Association’s account-wagering company and extend a broadcast-rights agreement with the association until 2030, the two companies announced Thursday. The agreement will fortify a relationship that began in 2016 when Fox Sports first collaborated with NYRA on a live-racing show from Saratoga Race Course. It also comes at a time when some account-wagering companies like those operated by NYRA have posted triple-digit growth rates as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to bans on racetrack attendance and a substantial migration of betting dollars to companies taking telephone and internet bets. The equity option in the deal needs regulatory approval, but a press release from the companies said that Fox Sports “will exercise this option in the summer of 2021.” The deal also includes a second option to take an undisclosed stake in the account-wagering company, called NYRA Bets. Tony Allevato, president of NYRA Bets, said in an interview Thursday that the option would allow Fox to purchase an additional “significant share” in the company but that NYRA would remain the majority partner. He said the option would become available “toward the end of the agreement” in 2030. Mike Mulvihill, executive vice president of Fox Sports and its head of strategy and analytics, said in an interview that the deal is a “blueprint” for other television networks across the United States that are seeking to partner with sports leagues on gambling deals in the wake of the 2018 ruling by the Supreme Court that allows states to legalize sports betting. :: Bet horse racing on DRF Bets. Double Your First Deposit Up to $250. Join Now. “This is the kind of partnership everyone will be looking for in the future,” Mulvihill said. He added that Fox’s equity stake would provide incentives for Fox to cross-promote the NYRA Bets platform through its various media properties. “The equity option opens up the possibility of doing all kinds of things,” Mulvihill said. “We think it’s really important for Fox to have skin in the game,” Allevato said. Under the agreement, Fox Sports will pay a rights fee to NYRA for its races, and NYRA will continue to produce the broadcasts aired on the networks affiliated with Fox Sports. The shows produced by NYRA include “Saratoga Live” and “America’s Day at the Races,” a title reflecting Fox Sports’s branding strategy. In 2020, Fox Sports broadcast 700 hours of live racing, in large part because of a request by Fox for NYRA to expand its existing production in order to fill out broadcast holes created by the widespread cancellation of sports early in the pandemic. Fox will continue to broadcast 700 hours of racing each year from NYRA’s Belmont and Saratoga as part of the extension, with 20 hours guaranteed on either the Fox flagship broadcast network or FS1, which have the highest viewership of all the company’s channels. Handle through NYRA Bets jumped 115 percent in the last three quarters of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, according to records at the Oregon Racing Commission, where NYRA Bets and many other account-wagering companies have hubs due to the state’s low tax rate. The jump made NYRA Bets fourth by market share among all ADWs hubbed in Oregon, though still a minor player compared to the so-called Big Three – TVG, Twinspires.com, and XpressBet. Still, the growth rate of NYRA Bets during the pandemic exceeded the growth rate of the Big Three companies, and Fox Sports is hoping to see further growth by leveraging NYRA’s signal to draw more bettors to the service, Mulvihill said. Fox’s parent company recently launched a betting service, Fox Bet, entering a marketplace saturated with competitors who have been jockeying for position since the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The president of Fox Bet is Kip Levin, who took the job in September 2020, after seven years as an executive at TVG and its parent company. Mulvihill said that the Fox Bet platform and the NYRA Bets platform “will be complementary for now,” but he said that he anticipated that the two platforms would be integrated more closely in the future. After the initial success of “Saratoga Live” in 2016, the broadcast-rights agreement between NYRA and Fox was extended late in 2017 until the end of 2020. In 2019, Fox Sports broadcast the Travers Stakes, Saratoga’s signature race, for the first time, and the extension announced Thursday will keep the race on Fox until 2030. The agreement does not include the Belmont Stakes and its undercard races, which are sold in a separate rights package currently owned by NBC. During the height of the pandemic, viewership for racing broadcasts on Fox networks quadrupled, but those numbers have come back to earth now that most sports are again playing live and racing has been shifted back to FS2. But Mulvihill said that the current racing viewership data is still strong. “Whether it’s wagering data or viewership data, we’re really happy with our relationship with racing right now,” Mulvihill said.