Derek's always good for a quote!
Leigh Leopards’
Derek Beaumont claims the “vast majority” of his fellow club owners now want a
14-club Super League - and there’s enough brave ideas to make it work. Increasing the competition from a dozen has generally been frowned upon by the powers-that-be - mainly because they’d each be getting a smaller piece of the broadcast deal pie.
But Beaumont, the brash multi-millionaire who has pumped a fortune into making Leigh competitive and is a walking advert for their Leopards moniker, reckons times are changing. He was one of the principal dissenting voices which led to RFL chairman Simon Johnson being overthrown in March and has, remarkably, helped put former RFL chief Nigel Wood back in charge trying to sort out the sport’s future.
But Beaumont, whose in-form
Leopards side visit red-hot St Helens tonight, fired: “When people go on about all this talk of the NRL taking over Super League and Super League's on its a*se, you can't be further from the truth.
“What’s the actual net worth of the owners of Super League?“When you look at the people in there, people like Mike Danson at Wigan, Warrington’s Simon Moran, Eamonn McManus at St Helens, Ken Davy with Huddersfield and now Matt Ellis in at Wakefield, all these people do not need to be desperately taking slack deals from Sky. We don't need £1.3 million [per year].
“We're not at their mercy. We’ve actually got the gold dust in our own hands in terms of either growing a streaming platform for our own games or making changes to actually define what our game should be. That could be in terms of how we eradicate loop fixtures. People go on about bringing magic back into the Challenge Cup, but what about if Magic Weekend became the last 16 of the Challenge Cup, so you've four games Saturday and four games Sunday over a Bank Holiday weekend?
“And it's guaranteed to involve two Championship teams in a 14-team Super League, and you've got no loop fixtures, but you've not lost that coming together at Newcastle? We can take a risk not to have it [Sky Sports money]. We can find it from another way.
“There's a strong appetite at the moment, not just a flavour, from the vast majority of Super League owners to get to 14 teams. And to find a way of doing it that doesn't hinge on a smile or anybody else, that takes the game by the scruff of the neck and face and creates some change to move us forward.”
Super League clubs are set to meet on July 28 to discuss moving up to 14 clubs in 2026 or 2027. Beaumont wants to see it happen next year. IMG’s points grading system is, in theory, still in play to see who might be added with Toulouse, Bradford - where part-owner Wood has temporarily stood down as chairman to take on his RFL role - London and York all hopeful of eventually being accepted.
But it remains to be seen if IMG will be involved following Wood’s latest strategic review of the sport. Sky have been Super League’s long-term broadcast partners since the competition’s start in 1996 but the size of their investment in recent years has dramatically fallen.
It was around £40m per season in 2021 but is now down to just £21.5m in a deal that runs out at the end of 2026. Unless another new deal is sorted before, the rights will then go out to tender.
Beaumont argued: “One of the best pieces of work that IMG did was a survey amongst all our fans and partners. If you look at the size of the database that they actually have and then us as individual clubs, too, there’s a lot to go at.
“IMG said recently that 120,000 people's primary reason to subscribe to Sky is rugby league. Now people might think that's a small number. But actually if you have people paying £40 per month to a dedicated rugby league channel, you only actually need 45,750 subscribers to generate what Sky gives us.
“As your starting point, if you look at the number of Super League season-ticket holders or members, across the member clubs currently, then you actually start to get out there and find out who would be into a dedicated channel. Who would be interested in seeing match review panels convening on TV programmes, in-depth, behind the scenes documentaries on each club, days in their lives with owners, watching me and Gavin Wild at the RFL locking horns on a disciplinary hearing over a leak from a player or watching Ben Garcia on his issue for whacking Elliot Minchella?
“All this other stuff that currently doesn't exist in one place where you can see the Wheelchair game, the Super League game, the League One, the Championship game, highlights packages... You would immediately attract far more than 45,000 people subscribing to that. And once you've got people subscribing at £40, you get it to 50, you can get it at 60…
“You take a Nines tournament around Europe and different places and attract subscribers to it by that, add little spin-offs. That's the future of the game and the big problem we have with it at the moment is loop fixtures just mess around with the league. We played Wigan twice away before playing them at home and turned the halfway point of the season without even playing St Helens once.”
Beaumont looks at DAZN as a streaming service who could offer “clear competition” to Sky. But he added: “It's going to be interesting at the same time. I think they [Sky] have every right to get the opportunity to do a deal with the sport before anybody else.
“They've done so well for 30 years and been a fantastic partner and if it weren't for them rugby league wouldn't be what it is today: a full-time elite professional sport. So they should always be congratulated on that. I'm pretty sure that the powers-that-be there will value the game correctly, more so if we come up with something different, and add different content for them, more varied content and a different calendar. Then it's something they'll pay for, I’m sure.
“How many people would, if rugby league wasn't available on Sky, subscribe to Sky? That's the acid test number to know what we're really worth. But it's significantly more than what we currently pay for it.”
As talks about increasing the number of clubs in Super League continue, Leigh Leopards' owner Derek Beaumont has outlined how he thinks it can work with or without main broadcaster.
www.alloutrugbyleague.co.uk
www.loverugbyleague.com
