Hard yards needed for sports to cash in

Roar Guru

28th February, 2010

1765 Reads

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The Crowd

Roar Guru

28th February, 2010

1765 Reads

The Commonwealth Government returned to the free to air channels effectively $1.5 billion per year, spread across all the major networks including the country networks like WIN and Prime, by reducing their TV licence fees. The fee reduction is to help fund the extra digital stations currently being rolled out by most networks.

Leaving aside arguments about why the Commonwealth did this, it does provide the ‘free to air’ (FTA) networks with a lot of extra loot. Some say it will help the FTA’s with funding sport products. Fox executives are not amused (that is an understatement).

My understanding is the FTA stations are all in a position to pay a good price for sporting product, which was not the case twelve months ago. Maybe the reductions in fees is helping.

Into the mix come ethical considerations by the FTA stations. Say Seven buy the AFL and Nine buy the rugby league, how much of their other programming goes to cross promotional broadcasting? Do shows like Sunrise interview mainly AFL players, do Nine do the same for rugby league?

As the battle for the major codes expands how does this affect smaller players?

The major codes as I see them are AFL, cricket, rugby league, rugby union and football. Tennis will always have a market for the majors. Beyond these how where do you get promoted?

I did a little bit of analysis to determine what each code had in terms of competition. I should say now I am assuming in the future that football’s under 23 Olympic and under 20 World Cups will each develop a following far in excess than what they currently do and I assume football will be free to air as well to some extent.

My chart assumes the competitions about 7 to 9 years out from now.

Sport	Domestic Competition	Inter State Competition	Domestic International Competition	International Competition
AFL	20 Team all states. 20 rounds plus finals	Assume Southern States.	Nil	Nil
Rugby League	18 team competition 24 rounds plus finals	NSW V QLD	One game per year	Various tests, assume 5 meaningful games per year
Rugby Union	Nil	Nil	Super 15	School Boy Wallaby Junior Wallaby Senior Olympic 7’s male Olympic 7’s female
Football	14 Team A-League 8 Team B-League Plus in Time a FA cup style competition.	At Junior levels only	Asian Champions League Min 24 games	Socceroos Matildas U 23 Olympic Male U 23 Olympic Female U 20 WC male U 17 WC male
Cricket	Nil	Nil really who watches shield cricket	20 20 ODM (50 o)	Test 20 20 ODI (50 o)

If you look at the sports, cricket and rugby union receive most of their funding for international matches. Football mainly from internationals but with a developing domestic competition. Rugby league for domestic, interstate and limited international, AFL for domestic and, sooner or latter, an inter-state competition.

The hard yards lie ahead for all codes to get their media deals in place.

Cricket, AFL and rugby league have traditional heartlands and large traditional viewing audiences. Rugby union less so but it does have an extra Super team and the 7’s rugby at the Olympics.

I will let other codes speak for themselves. Football is coming from a long way back in the field and in my opinion will grow in the first instance by the expansion of the international teams, being the Olympic teams and under 20 World Cup.

The A-League will continue to grow steadily but not steeply. The hard yards for football will be surviving until the next round of media deals.

But as we speak there is a lot of cash now available for sport because of the reduction in the FTA annual licences … it will be interesting to see how the various codes turn this to their advantage.

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