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The sale of Foxtel will have a massive impact on the next TV deal Peter V’landys signs.
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It’s been a fairly silent handover to date, but rugby league has undergone its biggest power shift since the mid-1990s and the result is about to play out explosively.
News Corporation has been the power behind the throne since it took the game over with an avalanche of cash in the bitter Super League war of 1995 to 1997, the catalyst for which was a pay TV battle between Foxtel and Optus.
News owned 65 per cent of Foxtel and Telstra 35 per cent.
Both Foxtel and Optus needed rugby league desperately for their fledgling operations, and News Corporation was prepared to do anything to own it.
Once the unsustainable impasse was over and the game re-united in 1998, News became the dominant co-owner of the NRL, and held the ownership until 2012.
Since then, it has wielded its power as pay TV rights holders via Foxtel’s Fox League, backed up by the significant clout of its metropolitan newspapers in Sydney and Brisbane.
The marriage of holding the rights and owning high-circulating mastheads meant it was a partner not to be crossed lightly if you worked out of NRL headquarters.
But it all ended a month ago when Foxtel’s $3 billion-plus sale to global sports broadcasting giant DAZN was finalised.
News exited because of a groaning $2 billion debt position accumulated by Foxtel.
DAZN, described as the Netflix of sports, is a mystery to Australians.
It broadcasts in markets all over the world, with 20 million global subscribers, predominantly across Europe, where it is the largest digital broadcaster, Asia and the Americas.
DAZN owner Len Blavatnik
DAZN owner Len BlavatnikCREDIT:
It is owned by Ukrainian-British businessman Len Blavatnik, said to be worth around $40 billion. He made his fortune in plastics and chemicals following the break-up of the Soviet Union, and also owns Warner Music, taking it over in similar circumstances to Foxtel as it too was laden with debt.
Since the handover, the spin has been that it will be steady as she goes for Foxtel, a comforting position for the NRL.
It would be naive to fall for it.
Since when has a powerful multibillionaire anywhere in the globe taken over a business and just let it roll along, especially when he had to wipe $2 billion of debt?
Evidence of inevitable change occurred last week when 100 Foxtel staff across marketing and engineering were made redundant.
The ownership change of Foxtel is of enormous significance for Peter V’landys and his NRL Commission.
In News Corporation, it had a familiar ally, with vested interests in the health of the NRL.
Despite the fact News secured a minority 6 per cent stake in DAZN and a board position, it will have little say, beyond guidance.
In DAZN and Blavatnik, the NRL doesn’t know exactly what they’re dealing with.
It does, though, have a significant bargaining chip. The game.
Foxtel boss Patrick Delany with the Australian Rugby League Commission’s Peter V’landys.
Foxtel boss Patrick Delany with the Australian Rugby League Commission’s Peter V’landys.CREDIT: GETTY
Without NRL, Foxtel and its digital sports arm Kayo would lose subscribers hand-over-fist on the eastern seaboard.
But the NRL doesn’t just need DAZN to keep the rights, it needs it to pay big for them – way bigger than News Corporation ever did via Foxtel.
V’landys has been smarting after accepting slightly in excess of $2 billion over five years (2023-27) from Nine and Foxtel in a post-COVID move in late 2021.
The amount was light, and V’landys made a startling admission in this masthead at the time that part of the reason he did the deal was because “if Fox coughs, all the codes catch a cold”.
It came back to bite him.
After he prevented Fox from coughing, the AFL swooped on the healthy company’s good fortune just seven months later and drew $4.5 billion for seven years from Seven and Foxtel, dwarfing the NRL deal by about $200 million a year.
It hurt. He’s determined to make amends, flooding the media with stats for the past year which back the position that the NRL draws bigger audiences and richer engagement than the AFL.
He hates losing to the Victorians, and his battle with them in the racing industry in his role as Racing NSW CEO is the genesis of a move by some powerful figures in that industry to oust him.
V’landys has publicly talked up the possibility of a $3 billion bonanza for the five years from 2027-31.
He has put a target on it, and anything short may be seen as a failure.
That’s where it gets tricky. DAZN is the key, and the NRL has to convince it to pay 50 per cent more than Foxtel did last time, or at the very least be such a keen bidder it forces someone else to.
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Who is the someone else? Free-to-air broadcaster Nine, the publisher of this masthead, and its digital arm Stan could try and go it alone, as could Seven.
You can rule Ten out, and then there’s the fanciful notion Netflix, Amazon or another global streamer could come in.
Splitting the rights up, as the NFL in the US does with different broadcasters on different days, should be dismissed.
Fans would not cop multiple digital subscriptions to watch their beloved game in a cost-of-living crisis.
Meanwhile, DAZN is in the midst of a ding-dong battle in France over the $2.8 billion it paid to broadcast Ligue 1, the top-tier of football.
In the first year of a four-year deal, DAZN says it has lost up to half a million dollars already because the French league inflated the value of the competition and does not want to honour the deal.
DAZN could be the NRL’s new ally, or a formidable foe.
