Formed in 1996 by News Corporation, the networks were acquired by The Walt Disney Company on March 20, 2019, following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox.

Depending on their individual team rights, some Fox Sports Networks maintained overflow feeds available via subscription television providers in their home markets, which provided alternate programming when not used to carry game broadcasts that the main feed could not carry due to scheduling conflicts.

On October 31, 1995, News Corporation, which ten years earlier launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, a general entertainment broadcast network that formed its own sports division in 1994 with the acquisition of the television rights to the National Football Conference of the National Football League, entered into a joint venture with TCI's Liberty Media, acquiring a 50% ownership interest in the company's Prime Sports affiliates Liberty in turn gained a stake in Fox's year-old cable channel FX.

[26] In 1999, Liberty Media (which had become a subsidiary of AT&T when AT&T acquired TCI earlier that year) sold its interest in Fox Sports Net and FX to News Corp.

The sale was part of a complex transaction involving a stock swap that gave Liberty an 8% interest in News Corp, making it the second largest shareholder.

[42] It was also in that year that FSN/Fox Sports Local relocated its headquarters from the Fox Studio Lot in Los Angeles to Houston, and then re-branded to its current branding.

On January 25, 2014, 21st Century Fox then became the YES Networks' majority owner by purchasing an additional 31% share of it, increasing the company's ownership interest from 49% to 80%.

[52] Due to a clause imposed on the original sale,[53] Yankee Global Enterprises had a right of first refusal to purchase Fox's share in YES Network.

Allen & Company and JPMorgan Chase, who were handling the FSN sale for Disney, asked that all bids include YES in their offers.

Minnesota Twins owner Jim Pohlad was reportedly interested in his team's broadcaster Fox Sports North.

[59] Discovery CEO David Zaslav stated that the company had considered a bid, but that regional sports networks were a "very treacherous market".

[63][64] In February 2019, it was reported that Apollo and Sinclair had dropped out (but with the former seeking a new partner), but that Liberty Media and Major League Baseball had made offers.

[71] Big3 stated that it wanted to expand the channels to include programming covering "broader cultural and political topics" of local interest alongside sports.

In April 2019, Big3 filed a complaint with the Department of Justice and FCC, accusing Charter Communications of attempting to "undermine" its bid by threatening to not carry the channels if it won the auction.

[74][75] On May 3, Sinclair officially announced that via its subsidiary Diamond Sports Group, it had agreed to purchase the networks for $10.6 billion, pending regulatory approval.

At the same time, it was also revealed that Allen Media Group would hold an equity stake in the company and serve as a "content partner".

[76] Three senators (Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) called for the sale to be reviewed by the Department of Justice, citing concerns over Sinclair's political views, and that it could use the networks as leverage for carriage agreements for its broadcast television stations.

[84] The next day, Sinclair announced that it had entered into an agreement with casino operator Bally's Corporation to acquire the naming rights under a 10-year deal.

Select games were also shown on Cox Communications local origination channels (later branded YurView), mostly in Rhode Island and Virginia.

To overcome this obstacle, Fox Sports Net paid WBIS-TV $30 million to broadcast games and nightly news shows for the next five years.

WBIS-TV itself was a new station that launched on July 1, 1996, when Dow Jones & Company and ITT Corporation purchased it from the City of New York.

The three networks were, more or less, condensed versions of the 22 FSN-affiliated networks (including Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic), though the channels also showed international events that did not fit within the programming inventories of FSN or Fox Soccer Plus (and prior to 2013, the latter's now-defunct parent Fox Soccer), such as the Commonwealth Games, World University Games and the FINA World Swimming Championships.

One notable agreement was that with the Pac-12 Conference, in which packages of football and men's basketball regular season games were broadcast across all FSN networks within the regions served by each Pac-12 member university.

Until August 2012, in some of regions served by that RSN, member channels of the competing Comcast SportsNet (as mentioned above) carried FSN programming through broadcast agreements with Fox Sports.

FSN distributed its first pay-per-view event on November 10, 2006, a boxing match in which former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield defeated Fres Oquendo in a unanimous decision at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.

In February 2008, FSN launched a public service initiative called "Americans in Focus", with the sponsorship support of Farmers Insurance.