League Express editor MARTYN SADLER wonders whether we will see Rugby League become available on a major streaming service from next season.
From next year, Rugby League will have one or more new broadcasting contracts.
All the existing contracts with Sky Sports, Channel 4 and ViaPlay expire at the end of this season, while the Challenge Cup contract with the BBC has another year to run.
At the Magic Weekend in early June, Super League’s Rhodri Jones appeared to suggest that he would be in a position to announce new broadcasting deals by the end of that month.
But now, the end of June has come and gone, and still we don’t know which broadcasters will have the rights to Rugby League from next year.
Sky Sports has recently agreed to pay an awful lot of money to broadcast a significantly increased number of matches in the English Football League.
Do they have any money left in the coffers for Rugby League?
Most observers suggest that the viewing figures for Rugby League on Sky this season have increased over the past twelve months.
But does that mean that Sky will increase the offer they might make to screen the Super League competition from next year?
That isn’t necessarily how it works.
When the former CEO of the RFL, Nigel Wood, managed to negotiate a deal worth £200 million from Sky over five years, he managed to persuade Sky that other broadcasters were ready to take Super League away from them.
It was a smart piece of negotiation by Wood. When that broadcast deal came to its conclusion, and Wood had left the RFL, his successors weren’t able to negotiate with that same threat in mind, and Sky significantly reduced the value of the broadcast deal, reducing its term to two years.
One of the things that hasn’t been widely noted about that decision by Sky is the fact that Wood had sold the rights to them on the basis that we were going to have the Super 8s format, which involved the bottom four teams in Super League and the top four in the Championship battling it out at the end of the season to settle promotion and relegation.
When that deal was offered to them, Sky responded by offering a huge amount of money for it.
It was a system that I didn’t like and the clubs decided that they didn’t either.
So in 2018 the RFL announced that the structure would be discontinued, presumably with little thought about how Sky would react when it came to negotiating the next contract.
Unfortunately, they then found out, with a substantially reduced deal that covered 2022 and 2023.
The media landscape is changing constantly, however, and we now see a preponderance of streaming services coming into the sports business.
One of the most dominant is DAZN, which is apparently backed by significant financial resources and is reported to be interested in buying the rights to broadcast Super League.
DAZN is a company that operates throughout the world, buying up broadcasting rights for major sporting events and streaming them to subscribers, who might typically pay £9.99 per month to gain access to the sports they cover.
In the United Kingdom, DAZN is probably best known for its deal with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Sports organisation to screen top-level boxing, which was announced in 2018.
There have also been separate deal with famous fighters, including Anthony Joshua and the great Mexican fighter Canelo Alvarez, although DAZN doesn’t have a deal with the undefeated heavyweight World Champion Tyson Fury, whose fights are mainly shown in this country in pay-per-view deals with BT Sport.
Unfortunately for DAZN, it seems to have been difficult for Hearn to stage enough high-level fights to draw in a huge audience, especially when it doesn’t have a stable of world champions in the highly politicised sport of boxing. Although I enjoy boxing myself, for example, I have never been tempted to take out a subscription
My impression is that many boxing fans don’t feel as though DAZN has delivered as much as they thought it would.
For example, the following is taken from a specialised boxing website, Fighthype.com, and the sentiment is not unusual in that sport.
‘Back in 2018, when the DAZN boxing project was first announced, Eddie Hearn held court in front of an enthralled media, beaming with the kind of self-importance that makes people want to believe. Maybe this company, with this kind of backing, would bring positive change to boxing.
‘“I needed artillery and we’re dangerous with artillery, let me tell you,” Hearn told media with a swagger at the official DAZN Boxing kick-off press conference in New York. “And now we’ve got it, $1 billion over eight years. We have by far the biggest rights budget in the sport of boxing and we’re going to be ultra-competitive. We’re going to put on the greatest shows with the greatest talent. This is a brand-new era for boxing in the US. We’re here and we mean business.
‘“We’re going to have a lot of fun and we have money never seen before in the sport of boxing,” Hearn added. “I can’t fail. If I fail here, I’m a disgrace.”
‘“Fail” is a subjective word in this particular case. Hearn hasn’t failed at scoring some big paydays for his Matchroom fighters and he’s certainly not failed in leveraging DAZN money into bolstering his own promotional stable. But DAZN Boxing has failed…and it’s failure has set back the sport of boxing.’
Rugby League, of course, is a very different sport when compared to boxing.
It’s a team sport with guaranteed regular content.
If DAZN were to buy up Rugby League, it could potentially pay very big money, but it would expect to generate big subscriptions in return. Could Rugby League deliver?
What we would probably find is that the six weekly Super League matches would be played at six different times over the weekend, to avoid clashing with each other, allowing subscribers to watch every game in the competition live, as they currently can in Australia with Fox Sports’ coverage of the NRL.
But that might mean that Rugby League could disappear from Channel 4 and from Sky Sports.
What would be the long-term consequences of that?
Has the apparent increase in viewership on Sky this year been caused by new viewers who got their first taste of the game by watching matches free to air on Channel 4?
Whoever is negotiating the new TV deals needs the benefit of some research on that topic.
To go solely with a streaming subscription deal with a company like DAZN, no matter how much money they would offer, would almost guarantee that Rugby League couldn’t grow in future.
I’m sure that the people making these decisions fully understand this point.
Or at least, I hope they do.
This article featured in Martyn Sadler’s ‘Talking Rugby League’ column in this week’s edition of League Express. To take out a subscription, go tohttps://www.totalrl.com/league-express/
