The sports industry continues to look for a competitor to step up and compete with ESPN, and the consensus at an industry conference last week is that only one group is poised to pose an actual threat to the sports-media giant: the leagues.

The majority of attendees at last week’s conference said they believed league-owned networks were most likely to compete with ESPN.

The finding did not surprise many of the panelists.

“I don’t think there’s any question that they are competitors in the marketplace,” said Sean Bratches, executive vice president of sales and marketing at ESPN. “We hold nothing against the leagues for trying to grow their business.”

But the panelists also suggested that while league-owned networks are likely to wind up with more live-game packages eventually, they aren’t likely to cut into the revenue their partner networks pay for rights.

“The amount of money each of the leagues is making from their network is de minimis compared to the amount of money we’re all paying for rights,” said Comcast Programming Group president Jeff Shell. “It’s going to be interesting to see over time how they manage that contradiction and how they manage a fair-bidding process when the auctioneer is one of the bidders.”

SCP Worldwide partner Carl Vogel, who used to run Charter Communications and Dish Network, agreed.

“The league networks could be a competitor over time to the extent the economics get a little bit out of whack,” Vogel said. “But it’s going to be a long time before you see any displacement among the major brands.”

Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, said ESPN still holds a massive advantage over its rivals because of the more than $4 per month license fee it gets from cable operators.

“No one in the history of media has ever opened up the New Year every year knowing they have $5 million sitting over there on the side of the room,” he said. “So anything ESPN wants, ESPN can have. Now whether that’s healthy in the long run for every sports property in America, you decide. Because at a certain point in time, all of us will be out of business, and then they’ll only be there to deal with everybody, and I don’t believe the goodness of their heart is better than the goodness of anyone’s heart in this room in a situation like that.”