https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/ni...rsion-from-the-main-game-20200409-p54iq4.html
Roy Masters
Sports broadcasters were succumbing to a virus well before the arrival of COVID-19, a virus not as deadly as the pandemic that has shut down leagues around the world and decimated advertising but an earlier debilitating disease, nonetheless.
The sickness attacking sport was cost-accelerating, unsustainable debt, mainly for media rights of the football codes and cricket. All this came at a time the revenue streams of the free-to-air and pay-TV broadcasters were under siege from streaming services such as Netflix.
So when the NRL's long-time FTA broadcast partner
delivered a scathing attack on the code on Thursday, it was paradoxically both unprecedented and unsurprising.
It’s all about cost.
Nine doesn’t want to pay full freight for a disrupted season with falling viewership.
Nor will the network even agree to pay a pro-rata amount for games telecast, given it will be played in empty stadiums, devoid of the theatre of the crowd, possibly all through 2020.
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Furthermore, Nine boss Hugh Marks probably wants to renegotiate the final two years of the 2018-22 contract.
In fact, he almost certainly seeks to extend the existing contract at significantly reduced rates.
The days when networks bought sports rights to prevent the opposition acquiring them – as Manly bought North Sydney first-graders and relegated them to reserve grade – are over.
But for Nine to launch this brutal salvo on rugby league because it has been shut out of the confidential talks over a restructured 2020 competition is a diversion.
Fox Sports, which televises exclusively five games a week to Nine’s simulcasted three, has been sidelined, too.
Given that ARLC chairman Peter V’landys is very close to News Corporation, which owns Fox, and has been the beneficiary of some recent, lavish praise from its newspapers, Fox’s Patrick Delany could have come out with a petulant page one protest.
ARLC chairman Peter V'landys.CREDIT:AAP
However, the shunning of both of the code’s telecasters ignores V’landys management approach, which is the converse of today’s inclusive style of empowering everyone around the boss.
He is autocratic and makes decisions quickly. NRL clubs are finding that ARL commissioner Wayne Pearce and ex-member for Dubbo Troy Grant, a former NSW Nationals leader, have formed a triumvirate, with V’landys dominating and everyone else subservient.
Clubs are equally in the dark, unsure whether the competition, due to restart on May 28, will be located in Sydney or Queensland, or whether it will be two conferences or one.
Now, with the
Herald suggesting all remaining rounds will be played, it would seem V’landys, while not talking to the telecasters, is at least listening, or more accurately, reading Marks’s play.
While Fox Sports hasn’t attacked the NRL with the unprecedented venom of Nine, it’s not as if the Murdoch empire hasn’t played a hard line with the other football codes in these belt-tightening times.
It is a network that has previously demonstrated a duty of care to Australian sports – it paid a restructured FFA above market rates to unshackle it from a nationalistic, sectional club structure and it elevated rugby union from shamateurism, launching Super Rugby 25 years ago with a $US550m 10-year contract.
But Fox Sports is bleeding red ink. It is dependent on $1.07 billion in shareholders' loans, has made 200 staff redundant and stood down another 140 on Tuesday. Those numbers could yet double as it seeks to further protect its bottom line.
Now Fox Sports is refusing to make another rights offer to Rugby Australia and will seek to free itself from soccer, with both sports having already sacked most of their staff.
So, where does that leave rugby league? It is a sport on the federal government’s anti-siphoning list, meaning it must be offered to a FTA broadcaster before Foxtel can bid.
The financial meltdown, aka the Corona Correction, won’t result in NRL being screened on the ABC, because no commercial network can exist without NRL or AFL.
Channel Ten had NRL in the 1990s, lost AFL rights 10 years ago and, as Global Sport and Media’s Colin Smith says, it has caused "a downward spiral ever since and led to their insolvency”.
Rather than abandon rugby league, Nine is likely to seek “exclusive NRL” content in a renegotiated contract, refusing Fox’s simulcast of its games.
Nine’s boss has picked only his first mark. His next fight will be with Fox.
Roy Masters
Roy Masters is a Sports Columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
