Key Points
- Alex Gersh, the man behind Sportradar’s Nasdaq listing, who then became CFO of Paysafe, is appointed as the new CFO of DAZN.
- Darren Waterman, the CFO who oversaw DAZN’s first profitable year in 2025, takes up a new commercial position.
- Patrick Delany steps from Foxtel Group CEO to global COO, taking over day-to-day trading across more than 200 markets.
Three executive appointments that are made at once. Three positions which have been either newly created or changed on the same day. It is when a company restructures its CFO position, hires a new COO and creates a whole new position of CBO at once that we get a story that is told through all these changes.
These three executives were announced by DAZN on 14 September 2026. They all report to Group CEO Shay Segev.
The CFO Hire DAZN Has Not Fully Explained
Alex Gersh’s career cannot be easily categorised, which may very well be the most intriguing feature of his appointment. Gersh was CFO at Betfair and Paddy Power Betfair from 2012 to 2018, and then CFO at Sportradar from 2020 to 2022, when he helped take the company public via the Nasdaq listing. After leaving Sportradar, Gersh was appointed CFO at Paysafe on 3 October 2022, a specialised digital payments platform. Subsequently, Gersh moved to Evelyn Partners and worked there as CFO for 14 months until the sale of the company to NatWest in June 2026. Before his time at the betting companies, Gersh had been working as CFO at NDS Group, the digital pay-TV software company, for almost eight years, and had also worked as finance director at British Telecom and Motorola.
That breadth matters because several outlets covering this appointment framed Gersh as a pure betting industry figure. His actual track record spans sports, wagering, digital payments and pay-TV technology, which is a closer fit for what DAZN actually is: a platform sitting at the intersection of all of those sectors.
The Nasdaq experience is the specific detail worth watching. At Sportradar, he built a high-performing finance function and guided the company through its public listing. Navigating a sports technology business to market requires investor relations discipline, regulatory compliance at a different level of scrutiny, and a finance function capable of withstanding quarterly public reporting. DAZN stated that Gersh will strengthen its financial strategy, capital allocation, performance and long-term value creation as the group enters its next phase.
According to the Financial Times, Segev had mentioned that DAZN was looking into going for an IPO, although it had decided to postpone any such move in 2023. Additionally, in June 2026, according to a report in the Financial Times, DAZN was working towards restructuring its operations in order to help it raise funds and perhaps also consider going public. However, no such plan or timetable has been set out yet, as hiring of a CFO who has done just that before does not happen by chance.
Waterman’s New Role and What It Reveals
Darren Waterman joined DAZN as CFO in January 2022, recruited from Amazon’s international Prime Video finance operation. His tenure covered the most consequential stretch in the company’s financial history.
The 2024 performance of DAZN reveals that there was an increase in its income by 11 per cent, totalling US$3.19 billion compared to US$2.86 billion the previous year, with the operating loss decreasing from US$1.37 billion to US$877.5 million. Profitability occurred in 2025, according to an announcement made by DAZN, although the company has not named any source of its income.
Retaining Waterman with an elevated remit, rather than replacing him outright, reflects where the deal-making complexity now sits. As the newly created chief business officer, he will spearhead strategic commercial, partnership, and transformational opportunities for the group. The separation of financial stewardship from commercial and M&A activity into two distinct C-suite roles suggests DAZN now sees both functions as too demanding for a single executive to manage comfortably.
Delany Carries Australia’s Lessons into a Global Remit
Patrick Delany’s move to COO carries a precise operational logic. As CEO of Foxtel Group since 2018, and previously CEO of Fox Sports Australia, he led the transformation of one of Australia’s largest media businesses, including the launch and growth of Kayo Sports and BINGE. Following DAZN’s acquisition of Foxtel, Delany led the successful integration, creating DAZN Australia, a company with products used in one of every two Australian homes.
Moving him to London as COO, with end-to-end responsibility for subscriber and revenue growth, rights renewals, content production, and advertising across 200-plus markets, places someone with demonstrated experience turning a complex, multi-product media business into a subscriber growth engine at the centre of DAZN’s daily operations. Peter O’Connell has simultaneously been confirmed as the new CEO of Foxtel Group in Australia.
DACH: A Quiet but Significant Change
Away from the other three major appointments, DAZN also announced that there was going to be a change in its leadership in the German-speaking area. Alice Mascia who has served as the CEO of the DACH business, which includes Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for four years is stepping down from her role in December 2026. Felix Krause joins DAZN again immediately as the deputy CEO for the region and he becomes the CEO of DACH from 1 January 2027. Felix Krause had previously left DAZN in 2025 and joined ProSiebenSat.1 Media.
Expert Analysis: The IPO Argument the Industry Keeps Sidestepping
We think DAZN is assembling a leadership structure shaped by a specific financial ambition, and the appointments on 14 September make that clearer than the company has stated publicly.
Since at least 2022, DAZN’s stated position has been that its betting arm is a supplementary revenue lever, not a strategic core. Segev put it plainly at the time: a subscriber who pays €30 a month and never bets is still a good customer. That framing proved sound. Revenues grew, losses narrowed sharply, and profitability arrived in 2025.
But viewing the shake-up in terms of gambling alone overlooks the bigger element of Gersh’s history. Gersh is now someone who has worked in the CFO role at two firms where either the firm has gone through a public market test via their Nasdaq listing for Sportradar or been a NYSE-listed firm like Paysafe. This mix of public markets expertise, integration experience and cross-industry financial expertise isn’t the sort of profile that comes along for a run-of-the-mill CFO role.
DAZN was reportedly restructuring its corporate organisation to make it easier to raise new money and explore a potential public listing. Paired with a COO experienced at converting a large media business into subscriber growth, and a CBO focused entirely on deals and partnerships, the structure DAZN is building looks less like a management refresh and more like preparation for external capital scrutiny.
We are not suggesting an IPO is certain. DAZN has considered and deferred that path before. Still, the evidence points to a business actively building foundations that can withstand outside investors asking hard questions. Whether that means a listing, fresh equity, or another form of capital raising, the next chapter Segev keeps referencing now has a leadership team that has, collectively, done versions of this before.
Explore more:
Share
3 views
