Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer explains how sports leagues, sports betting companies like DraftKings, and Formula 1 racing are responding to the Russia-Ukraine war and subsequent sanctions.

Video Transcript

- One place where we're seeing the fallout and the ripple effects of the happenings in Ukraine is in the sports world. And just breaking across the wire now, DraftKings now saying they're going to take action preventing people from being able to bet on sports in Russia and also Belarus. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer, who's been watching all of this very closely. Josh, what are we hearing from the sports betting apps?

JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah, Brian. So DraftKings just in the last five minutes announced that they will not be allowing gambling on leagues and sporting events that take place in Russia or Belarus. So reading from the statement here they said, quote, "as of today, we will no longer offer betting on sports leagues and events in Russia and Belarus, such as the KHL. DraftKings has no direct commercial relationship with any Russian or Belarusian league, team, or sports organization."

So DraftKings is not going to be allowing anyone to bet on any events that were happening over there. Of course, there aren't necessarily a ton of events with US interests that happen in Russia. One that also got crossed off the board earlier today that we can note is F1. F1 came out today and said that they won't be participating having events in Russia moving forward at all.

And so that's maybe something that people would have bet on on DraftKings that it will no longer be available. But F1 is also stepping away. So you kind of have both sides here. You have the betting side and the side that puts together the event both taking a step back from Russia and trying to separate themselves from them at this moment it seems like.

- Yeah. Increasingly, Russia being isolated on so many fronts. Josh, you know, we were talking a few days ago about one of the biggest names in sports, which is, of course, the Chelsea Football Club, owned by a Russian millionaire, billionaire, who's now saying he's going to put the team up for sale What more do we know about this? And I'm assuming he's gotten bidders already, right?

JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah, Akiko. Well, that's going to be the interesting part I think. So I think the biggest part of this is going to be who's interested and willing to buy a club that is being sold by a known Russian oligarch and the implications and kind of the PR nightmare that's probably going to come with that because he's clearly not selling Chelsea FC because he just wants to. He's selling it because of the different pressures that are going on in the ongoing war in Ukraine and his potential relationship with Vladimir Putin and the different links of how he earned his money in the past.

The club is estimated at about $3.2 billion. It's going to be a huge sale whenever it does happen. People have estimated that the sale itself might be closer to $1.5 to $2.5 billion. It's not really clear who's going to be interested just yet. They've said that they're going to try and close out sort of the interest by the end of the week and then run a normal bidding process for it. The Raine Group is running that bidding.

We'll have to see how it plays out. But I think it's going to be one of the finest examples we've seen yet of what happens to these Russian billionaire assets when they try and get rid of them. Do people actually want to buy those? Because we're going to know who buys Chelsea FC when they buy it. And they're going to have to answer those kinds of questions when that does happen.