Cricinfo fans, look out: ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is fixed on an international rebranding drive. The US sports giant renamed 11-year-old Scrum.com “ESPNScrum.com” last week and will rebrand its European NASN TV channel “ESPN America” in February. At our EconSports conference in New York, ESPN content EVP John Skipper said more such tweaks to its properties may be coming down the pipe…

“ESPN has believed in the power of the ESPN brand and has not tried to create a ton of sub-brands—everything I have decision-making power over, I re-brand as ‘ESPN’. ‘ESPN’ represents something - sports with authority and personality - people believe in it. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t take advantage of it.”

That puts Cricinfo (acquired last June by ESPN) and new motor-racing stablemate Racing-Live (bought in August) on alert for a name change. ESPN has previous experience in this area - it also re-Christened Soccernet “ESPNSoccernet” after buying a majority from DMGT back in ‘99. Cricinfo has large and loyal followings in the UK, India and Australia that could reasonably wonder how long it will be before the site turns into ESPNCricket.com. Skipper argued “ESPN”‘s brand recognition would boost interest; that may be the case in America, but many European sports fans may be oblivious.

—European rights: Skipper said ESPN wanted to buy more European sports rights, but mainly to fill dead US air-time. “We’re not anti-timezone at our company. We do European soccer in the afternoon, we just got Indian cricket rights for the US - I’m thinking that might make a good product for 4 a.m.”

—Premier League goal And, repeating ESPN’s earlier statement on English soccer, Skipper said he would “love” to get Premier League rights, which will be auctioned off next year, putting it in competition with BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) and Setanta: “I love soccer and there is a growing audience for the Premier League that would make a great product for ESPN.” The price is steep, however - BSkyB paid £1.31 billion for 92 live games and Setanta paid £396 million for 42. And, while ESPN is attracting record levels of traffic and engagement online, things aren’t going as well for Skipper as a sports fan: he is a Spurs supporter…

• ESPN Renames Scrum.com ‘ESPNScrum.com’; Killing Its Best Asset?
• ESPN Buys Cricket Website Cricinfo