Fantastic article here outling Murdoch's grasp on league over the years. Roy Master's mentioned in an article during the week that after taking a shot at the NRL nine would then focus on News Ltd and here it is in all it's gory details how Murdoch squeezed and held league back financially.
Interestingly when the SL war first broke out the league had $20 million in reserves and the AFL only $6 million.
As we all suspected Murdoch's hold on league put the game 20 years back allowing AFL to shoot ahead.
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/sp...-t-run-the-show-any-more-20200410-p54ivj.html
OPINION
The good news? At least Rupert doesn't run the show any more
Darren Kane
Sports Columnist
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Rugby league not only survives in spite of hate, it thrives because of the feudal wars, mutual detestations and loathing ingrained in the DNA of the game. That’s its lifeblood.
So why would it be any different amid the ever-evolving global coronavirus catastrophe? Just this week, the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres entreated that warring national forces across the globe to down their weapons and retreat from the theatre of battle lest the coronavirus become impossible to contain against the backdrop of bloodshed.
That forced marriage was welded together following a horrible, three-year fight for control of the game, which ended after the 1997 seasons for the ARL and Murdoch’s “Super” League competitions.
The ARL had $20 million or thereabouts in the bank before News Ltd pulled the trigger on its April Fool’s Day devilry in 1995. The “war” properly robbed the game of whatever wealth it enjoyed in the early '90s. To put perspective on the ARL’s financial position in 1994, the AFL had less than $6m in cash.
Rugby league’s Treaty of Versailles, executed in early 1998, brought under one roof two parties which fairly detested each other, but nonetheless were co-dependent. Though known as the NRL Partnership, it was anything but a partnership by definition.
Starkly, it was a term of the marriage agreement that News Limited owned the right of first refusal, and the right of last bid over every form of rugby league broadcast rights - defined to include television, pay TV, radio and internet rights, as well as types of audiovisual dissemination not even conceived of in 1998, such as Netflix and Facebook - until 2023: TWENTY-FIVE years.
Essentially, the NRL Partnership couldn’t properly monetise its assets, because the Murdoch empire had rugby league shackled in an awful Christmas hold. And the powerful, compounding effect is self-evident.
Rupert Murdoch had a stranglehold on the game under the NRL Partnership.CREDIT:AAP
The NRL Partnership, which ran the game before it was dissolved in 2012, is the entity to compare to the ARL Commission in the present day. For the period ending after that 2010 NRL season, the NRL Partnership's annual revenue was $146m. It had $20m in the bank, and total equity of $34m. For that year, it granted $55.2m to the 16 NRL clubs; $3.45m a slice. Total broadcast revenue was $96m.
Again, those amounts are meaningless as a snapshot of nine years ago, without something to compare it to. The financials of the AFL constitute the best barometer. For the same year ending on 31 October 2010, the AFL reported revenues of $367m. In 2010, the AFL paid $141m to its 16 clubs (almost triple the NRL Partnership numbers; GWS and Gold Coast hadn’t joined the fray yet), and yet retained assets worth $166m, including $54m in folding.
The AFL’s broadcast revenues were a multiple of the NRL Partnership’s. The AFL, of course, wasn’t smothered by contractual obligations to News Ltd, the effect of which was the NRL Partnership was forced to undersell its rights, year on year on year.
Rugby league was only freed from News Ltd’s clutches once the ARLC structure was cemented in 2012. It would be another three years, however, before all “first and last” rights provisions, favouring incumbent broadcasters bidding for new rights agreements, were obliterated (and it has never been highlighted sufficiently how valuable this achievement was for the game).
To pause at that juncture, rugby league in Australia was financially massacred by the Super League fiasco. The financial recovery has taken more than two decades. If the ARLC is in a parlous financial state, it’s not as simple as sheeting home blame to those who presently control the game’s destiny. The finger ought instead be pointed at Jerry Hall’s husband.
That’s not to say questions shouldn’t be asked after an examination of the ARLC's financials, released last February. Since 2010, total game revenues and the commission’s net assets have slightly more than tripled, whereas aggregate payments to NRL clubs have more than quadrupled.
The total equity of the commission now is a bit more than four times that of the NRL Partnership a decade ago. The commission reported a surplus of $30m for the year to October 31 2019; it has reported a deficit as many times as it has a surplus since 2012. Margins in this business are on a hair trigger.
What to take home from all this? Yes, in a way it's staggering that it costs $181m per year to run the NRL - and rugby league has seemingly morphed from being just a sport to some sort of cultural and societal way of being.
Yes, NRL clubs have had it too good, being funded over each of the past two years to the tune of more than $220m; a 42 per cent increase from the funding arrangements in place between 2014-2017. Moreover, the NRL gives a higher percentage of its revenue (44 per cent) to its clubs, compared to the AFL (40 per cent), and the AFL has two more mouths to feed. And, yes, the total equity of the AFL in the last reporting period is double that of the ARLC's.
And yes, the AFL’s revenues presently are 45 per cent more than the ARLC's. But squarely - and you can only really appreciate rugby league’s situation by contrasting the numbers against the AFL’s - rugby league’s parlous position can only be explained by arguing that it’s News Corporation’s and Jerry Hall’s husband’s fault. The disastrous events of the mid-90s jettisoned rugby league on a trajectory that has only, in the past few years, been somewhat arrested.
And remember this: matters would have been magnitudes worse had the Murdoch empire not been exorcised from its part-ownership of professional rugby league in Australia. Otherwise, News Corp would still have a stranglehold on all the game’s media rights for another three years.
