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The Roar talks with World Rugby's head of broadcast Murray Barnett

Japan's success at the 2015 World Cup will have them humming for the first game of 2019. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP, File)
14th July, 2016
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This week The Roar was given the opportunity to talk with Murray Barnett, head of broadcast, commercial and marketing at World Rugby, to discuss rugby’s expansion, World Cups past and present, and rugby sevens ahead of his presentation at the Ministry of Sports Marketing Conference.

What do you see as the ultimate goal for rugby in the next decade?
With the inclusion of sevens at the Olympics, coming on the back of our most successful Rugby World Cup ever, we have an opportunity to significantly grow our participation levels and turn it into a truly global sport.

We don’t necessarily see ourselves as in competition with soccer or other sports, we see ourselves as complementary and that there’s room for everybody to exist. Certainly growing rugby outside its traditional markets and turning it into something truly global is the main objective over the next decade or so.

What are the main difficulties with that?
The 15s game can be something that’s quite difficult to understand from a laws of the game perspective. We need to put in some effort to make it more accessible to people.

Also, the perception of the physicality of the sport is become increasingly an issue. There are similar issues around concussion in the NFL, and we’d like to think rugby is leading the way in making sure that our game is as safe as it can possibly be.

Rugby’s brand plays a big role in expanding the sport. What do you see rugby’s brand as at the moment?
We think of rugby as being a sport of character with values that transcend the sport. They’re values which you can take into life and they’ll hold you in good stead; solidarity, courage, integrity, all of these elements which perhaps other sports don’t have in their DNA.

The World Cup was fairly unanimously heralded as a success last year. But given how successful it was, do you think there’s a risk rugby is only a top-tier sport every four years?
I think most sports suffer something along those lines. In soccer, the FIFA World Cup is still head and shoulders above any other competition, and the same is true of most other sports that have a world cup-type event.

Doing something on a more regular basis is something we’ve looked at as an organisation – we’re always looking to innovate at look at different things. But there are some elements which are set in stone so any changes we make now are going to take quite a long time to come to bear.

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You mentioned the FIFA World Cup there, but football has competitions like the English Premier League and UEFA Champions League which still have a very prominent global profile, giving football a bit more currency. Do you think it’s an issue that rugby doesn’t quite have that?
Football is a much more ubiquitous sport around the world. Expanding our global footprint is certainly a key objective over the next decade, and there are opportunities for the sport to grow in certain places.

Even if they’re only tuning in for the World Cup now, we see, anecdotally at least, that that’s helped other rugby competitions to secure better reach in other markets. NBC in the USA is a good example where they’ve been our partner for the Rugby World Cup for the past two or three editions and they’ll be showing Premiership Rugby starting next year.

How do you leverage the success of the World Cup to make rugby more prominent across the whole four-year cycle?
Certainly, there are some markets where we have the nice serendipity of being able to extract good rights and still get good exposure. Our strategy in other markets is slightly different. Germany’s a good example where we’ve had a slightly higher offer from pay television and we took the view to go with EuroSport, who were willing to go free-to-air and ended up having more games on their schedule.

So when we look at sales outside of the core markets we are trying to focus on exposing the game to a broader audience, and hopefully that then opens the door a crack in some of those markets for other competitions to come in and ride off the back of that.

Speaking of new markets, Japan will host the next World Cup. Given they are the next hosts, how important was it for them to do well at the last World Cup.
It was crucial. The Japanese are no different to any other nation in the world in that if a team is successful, then it creates a greater interest in the sport. We went from an average of one million TV viewers for international rugby prior to the World Cup to 20 plus during the World Cup, so we’re certainly exposing it to a much wider audience.

Our feelings pre-World Cup about Japan were very much that the reason to go to Japan was to give it a boost and put it in the front of everybody’s mind, and success on the pitch is the easiest way to achieve that other than taking competitions there.

Late last year there were reports saying that, because Tokyo is hosting the 2020 World Cup, there will be another early draw for the next World Cup. Is there a real chance of that happening?
We will do an early draw which will be in May next year, and it’s largely Olympics-related in the sense that you don’t want to be going up against Olympic ticket sales. Also having certainty over who’s playing who where is helpful for the organising committee. We had a debate with the organising committee and agreed that this probably ended up being the best time to do it.

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Were there many concerns about creating another ‘Group of Death’?
I think as long as everybody knows the rules they can accept that what’s coming is coming. Would we have liked to avoid the ‘Group of Death’ before? Maybe, but would that have been fair on the other teams which had performed better and put themselves in the better position?

How concerning are the poor Super Rugby TV ratings for the current season, considering that the rise in TV rights has come largely from the Northern Hemisphere?
I think any time you put on a new competition structure or you get an expanded competition, it requires a couple of years to settle down in people’s minds and get people interested. I think it’s also important to have enough competitiveness across the board to generate the kind of games that people want to watch.

China and America are probably the two biggest sports markets in the world. How do you plan to grow rugby in those two countries?
Taking China first, the advantage of being the governing body is that we can take a bit of a long-term view about how we can grow there. We’re not naive about expecting it to be the biggest sport in China in the next three years – I think it will take a ten-year partnership to see it grow – but because of the size of the market even a relatively modest growth is going to have a huge impact.

In the States, rugby is the fastest-growing team sport and they’ve just launched a five-team pro league there. It’s a fairly modest start, but it’s attracting a small but passionate audience and increasingly we’re seeing rugby on the biggest networks. SANZAR is now on ESPN, with the main games appearing on ESPN1 or ESPN2, Premiership Rugby is on NBC, and we have the Sevens World Series on NBC Sports, so there’s certainly much greater coverage of the sport.

What we’re seeing is that successful growth of soccer in the States over the last fifteen years or so is now benefitting rugby. Everybody’s looking at what the next thing that can grow is after soccer and rugby’s certainly seen as something which embodies a lot of things which work well in America; it’s a team sport, there’s a certain amount of physicality to it, it’s high-scoring. There are lots of elements to it which appeals to a US audience.

There’s been a massive growth in soccer in China of recent times, do you think it can have a similar effect there to the US?
You’d hope so. It’s a little bit more straightforward with soccer in China in the sense that they have pretty much declared that they want to get a World Cup.

They’ve certainly indicated to us that they’d like to hold a Rugby World Cup in the future. I suspect it’s a little bit further away, but what you’re seeing in China is just a general interest in sport. The fact they can invest so much money in soccer, other sports are now benefitting from that in terms of just the high profile of the sporting landscape.

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Rugby sevens is a growth point for the sport, but do you think there’s a risk that it cannibalises your own product?
I don’t think it’s cannibalising at all. If we only had the fifteens game, expanding it beyond core markets would be very difficult. We’re seeing that sevens is something that appeals to a much younger audience.

Whereas before you could argue it cannibalised it a bit because it was still seen as rugby, I would argue that sevens attracts quite a different audience to the fifteens fan. That’s not to say that if you’re a fifteens fan you’re not a fan of sevens, but there are sevens fans who aren’t necessarily fifteens fans.

But is there a risk that you’re taking people away from the fifteens game with sevens or that there’s going to be difficulties in turning sevens fans into fifteen-a-side fans?
So long as people pick up a rugby ball or watch rugby, I’m not that bothered about which code they’re watching. The experience of the sevens game is such a different thing I’m not sure a lot of people see it as cannibalising it because it’s a very different type of competition. Also, the cannibalising argument is one which doesn’t seem to hold water because we’re seeing growth both in fifteens and in sevens.

To finish up, if there was one thing you could improve or change with rugby’s current broadcast or online presence, what would it be?
The obvious answer to that is to have more exposure on more free-to-air broadcasts around the world. Live sport is one of the last bastions of people making these appointments to view and you’ve got to create the right windows on the right platforms for them to be able to do that.

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