Nine won’t prop up the rights price next time around

 
Bruce Walkley Roar Pro

By , 15 Oct 2008 Bruce Walkley is a Roar Pro

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Hawthorn's Stuart Dew and St Kilda's Robert Harvey in action during the AFL 2nd Preliminary Final between the Hawthorn Hawks and the St Kilda Saints at the MCG.

The global finance crisis should be ringing alarm bells loud and clear as the AFL pushes on with its fanciful plans to base the competition’s 18th team in western Sydney. The league’s strategy is centred on being able to get a hefty increase in payments for television rights when they come up for renewal in 2012.

But this is a long way from being a lay-down misere. It certainly wouldn’t happen if the rights were up for negotiation now.

And, in the unlikely event that the world economic scene rids itself of all its woes in the next three years, there’s no assurance that big dollars will automatically be on offer from the television networks.

The current AFL deal under which the Seven and Ten networks are forking out $780 million over five years came about only because Kerry Packer goaded them into it by pitching in with that unrealistically high figure on behalf of Nine, knowing full well that his competitors had the right to match it and probably would.

Next time, with KP no longer with us, Nine is highly unlikely to even bother putting in a bid, given its commitment to rugby league, which comes a lot cheaper.

Nine’s new masters are not into spending big dollars on anything much these days, let alone a football code that is still like a foreign language to more than half their viewers.

All of which means there’s unlikely to be another bidding war like the last one to force Seven and Ten to pay top dollar.

Another pertinent factor is viewers’ resentment of delayed telecasts, and the networks’ indifference to their plight.

This year’s finals series had Seven and Ten scurrying for cover and asking the AFL to allow delayed transmissions of Friday and Saturday night games in Sydney and Brisbane, apart from the ones involving the Swans, partly because of a clash with Seven’s Olympics coverage but also because the networks feared poor ratings.

Live Friday night telecasts on Foxtel’s Main Event channel, which had happened throughout the season under an arrangement with Seven and the AFL, were conspicuous by their absence, with Main Event saying it hadn’t been asked, either by the network or the league, to telecast the finals matches.

The AFL was weak-kneed in agreeing to the networks’ pleas – after all, it had trumpeted better coverage in the northern states as an important step forward in its expansion plans when the rights agreement was signed.

It should have insisted that if Seven and Ten didn’t show the finals games live on their main channels in Sydney and Brisbane, they should hand them over to Main Event or run them on their new high-definition outlets.

There was some mumbling that the networks couldn’t use the HD channels because of regulations prohibiting multi-channelling. But, curiously, that hadn’t stopped Ten from showing some of the US Masters golf on HD instead of its main channel earlier in the year.

The answer is for the Federal Government to insist on a use-it-or-lose it system for major sports events, or for the anti-siphoning laws, under which the free-to-air channels get first crack at a ludicrously long list of events, to be scrapped or relaxed to a great degree.

It isn’t just football fans who have suffered under these archaic regulations, either. Remember the shemozzle when the Ashes cricket tour clashed with Wimbledon a few years ago?

It will be interesting, too, to see what happens to attendances at big sports events as a result of the current financial climate.

The people who fill the corporate boxes – largely affluent yuppies who make a living in the rarefied atmosphere of the sharemarket, where many of them owe their success to selling shares they don’t own – have been feeling the squeeze as credit has dried up.

There are reports of a glut of second-hand Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Alfa Romeos up for sale because, as the market has plunged, their “owners” have been forced to meet calls on margin loans they took out to buy shares, which in turn has meant they can’t afford the car payments.

Another report early this week said there were 200 houses in the million-dollar price bracket for sale in the affluent Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman.

And while all this is going on, the AFL is pinning its hopes on pulling in more and more corporate dollars, including even higher TV rights payments, to support a team in the far less affluent western suburbs of Sin City.

But what will the outcome be if, as expected, Nine sits on its hands? It’s hard to see even a half-hearted bidding scuffle, let alone a war, if the only two players in the game are the present joint rights holders.
In those circumstances the rights outside the traditional Australian football states could go for a song.

Is that Half A Sixpence I can hear in the distance?

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