As Disney considers a strategic partner for ESPN, CEO Bob Iger and ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro have held initial talks about bringing in professional sports leagues as minority investors, including the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, according to people familiar with the matter.

ESPN has held preliminary discussions with both the NFL and the NBA about various new partnerships and investment structures, the people said. In a statement, an NBA spokesperson said, “We have a long-standing relationship with Disney and look forward to continuing discussions about the future of our partnership.”

Spokesmen for ESPN and the NFL declined to comment.

The talks with the NFL came in conjunction with the league’s own desire for the company to take a stake in its media assets, including NFL Network, NFL.com and RedZone, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks were private.

The NBA and Disney have floated multiple potential structures around renewing the media rights, the people said. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery they have exclusive negotiating rights with the NBA until next year.

Iger said last week in an interview with CNBC’s David Faber that Disney is seeking a strategic partner for ESPN as it prepares for the sports network’s transition to streaming. He didn’t explain exactly what that meant, other than that the partner could add value through distribution or content. He admitted that the sale of the share in the company is possible.

Disney owns 80% of ESPN. Hearst owns the remaining 20%.

“Our position in sports is very unique and we want to stay in this business,” Iger told Faber. “We’ll be open-minded about finding strategic partners to help us with distribution or content. I won’t go into too much detail, but we’re bullish on sports as a media property.”

In theory, a jointly owned subscription streaming service between multiple leagues could eventually provide consumers with new game packages and other innovative ways to consume content.

The move would make sense for Disney as it seeks to break out of the traditional cable subscription model and underscores how eager the company is to find solutions for the sports network as its linear subscribers decline. Still, ESPN’s viewership has been rising for major sporting events in recent years. There is no better partner for sports content than the leagues themselves.

On the surface, this may make less sense for the NBA and NFL, which sign lucrative media rights deals with multiple media partners that support team revenue and player salaries with a number of media companies.

Professional sports leagues could face a conflict of interest if they acquired a minority stake in ESPN. Owning a stake in ESPN may irritate Disney’s competitors, such as ComcastNBCUniversal, Fox, Amazon, Paramount Global and Apple, who help leagues make billions of dollars by engaging in bidding wars for sports rights. Taking an ownership stake in ESPN could give the leagues an incentive to increase the value of that entity rather than strike deals with competitors.

Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League may also want to be involved in any deal that includes the NBA and NFL, one of the people said. The involvement of multiple leagues in a strategic investment would be complicated and unprecedented. MLB and the NHL did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

There would also be hurdles for Disney. ESPN also employs hundreds of journalists who cover the major sports leagues. Selling the ownership stake to the leagues could cloud perceptions of the objectivity of ESPN’s news apparatus.

Still, the leagues are already ESPN business partners. It’s possible ESPN could put measures in place to ensure reporters can continue to cover the leagues while minimizing conflicts, but that adds another layer of complexity to any deal.

ESPN is trying to forge a new path as a digital streaming entity. Disney realizes that ESPN won’t be able to make money like it used to in the traditional TV model.

Selling a minority stake in ESPN’s leagues could ease future rights payments, allowing Disney to better compete with the large balance sheets of Apple, Google and Amazon. It would also guarantee ESPN a steady stream of premium content from the leagues.

Up until last quarter, Disney’s suite of linear TV networks was still seeing revenue growth as increases in affiliate fees to pay-TV providers — driven in large part by ESPN — made up for the millions of Americans who ditch cable each year. That trend ended last quarter for good, according to people familiar with the matter. Accelerating cancellations have now overwhelmed fee increases and non-advertising linear TV revenue has begun to decline.

“There was a lot of talk about renting [sports right] versus owning,” Iger said in an interview with CNBC last week. “If you can rent it and continue to profit from the rental, which we have been and we believe we will continue to be, then it’s worth staying in. We have great relationships with Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League and various college conferences and of course the NFL and the NBA. It’s not just about the live sports of these leagues, these teams, it’s also about all the arm programming that they have on ESPN and what you can do with that in the streaming world.”

ESPN would love to turn itself into a streaming hub for all live sports. Management would like to launch a feature that would allow ESPN.com or the ESPN app to direct users to games regardless of where they’re streaming, CNBC reported earlier this year.

While striking a deal with professional sports leagues wouldn’t be easy, Disney appears to be pushing the boundaries of its thinking as it prepares for a streaming-dominated world that includes an entire portfolio of sports rights.

“If [a partner] it comes to the table with value, whether it’s content value, distribution value, whether it’s capital, whether it’s just helping to de-risk the business — that wouldn’t be the main driver — but if they come to the table with value that allows ESPN to move to a direct-to-consumer offering, we’ll be very open-minded about that,” Iger said.

WATCH: Disney CEO Bob Iger talks to CNBC’s David Faber about ESPN and its future