DAZN has appointed Alex Gersh as chief financial officer and Patrick Delany as chief operating officer, both effective immediately, in a leadership change that puts two executives with betting and pay-TV backgrounds at the centre of the sports streamer’s commercial operation.
Gersh succeeds Darren Waterman, who moves into a newly created chief business officer role. The company also confirmed a change at the top of its DACH business, where Alice Mascia leaves at the end of the year after four years as regional chief executive.
A CFO drawn from betting and sports data
Gersh arrives with 25 years of international financial leadership across sports, betting, technology and telecoms. He was CFO of Betfair, and stayed on as CFO of Paddy Power Betfair following the 2016 merger. He later joined Sportradar and took the sports data supplier through its Nasdaq listing.
At DAZN he takes responsibility for financial strategy, capital allocation, group performance and long-term value creation.
The hire reads as a deliberate choice for anyone tracking DAZN’s gambling ambitions. DAZNBet is live in the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and Ontario, and the company has been building advertising, ticketing and B2B data services alongside the subscription business. Gersh’s career runs straight through a listed sports data business and two of the largest betting operators in Europe, which is a specific kind of experience to put in charge of the capital.
Delany moves from Foxtel into group operations
Delany becomes COO from London, with a remit covering day-to-day trading performance, subscriber and revenue growth, pricing and packaging, sports rights renewals, content production, advertising and sponsorship.
He led Foxtel Group as chief executive from 2018 and ran Fox Sports Australia before that. He also handled the integration of Foxtel into DAZN after the acquisition, creating DAZN Australia, which the company says now has products in one of every two Australian homes. DAZN puts his experience in sports, media and digital subscription businesses at more than 30 years.
Rights renewals sitting inside the COO remit is the detail worth watching. Sports rights are the largest cost line in the business, and the pricing and packaging decisions that offset them now report into the same person.
Waterman takes the deals brief
Waterman has been CFO since 2022 and led the company through what DAZN describes as a profitable year in 2025. As chief business officer he moves onto strategic commercial work, partnerships and distribution agreements, plus corporate transactions.
That is a corporate development role in practice. DAZN has bought Foxtel Group, ViewLift and EverPass, added FIFA+ to the platform and delivered the FIFA Club World Cup, and the company says it now streams more than 150,000 live events a year across over 200 markets.
“DAZN is entering an exciting new chapter of profitable growth. Our built-for-sport platform is now available in more than 200 markets,” said group chief executive Shay Segev.
The numbers behind the reshuffle
DAZN narrowed its net loss to roughly $936 million in 2024, down from about $1.4 billion the year before, on revenue reported at $3.19 billion, up 11%. The company says it reached profitability in 2025, its first year in the black after a decade of heavy spending on rights.
The structure announced this week is built around holding that position. A COO owning trading, pricing and renewals, a CFO owning capital allocation, and a separate executive owning deals is a division of labour more common in a mature subscription business than in a growth-stage streamer.
Germany, Austria and Switzerland get a new chief
Felix Krause returns to the business immediately as deputy chief executive for DACH and becomes regional CEO on 1 January 2027. Mascia departs at the end of the year.
The timing matters for the betting side. Germany is one of five DAZNBet markets and the most restrictive of them, with deposit limits, stake caps and a whole-of-market self-exclusion scheme in OASIS shaping what a sportsbook attached to a streaming product can realistically do. Whoever runs DACH sets the tone for that.
What to watch next
The open question is how far DAZN pushes betting and data as revenue lines now that a former Betfair and Sportradar CFO controls the capital. Sports rights and betting brands keep converging across Europe, where operators have been locking in league-level deals such as Luckia’s LaLiga partnership through to 2029, and DAZN owns both the rights and the audience in several of those markets.
The next test is the 2026 accounts, and whether a first profitable year turns into a pattern once the renewal cycle comes round again.
Source: DAZN
