Mammoth AFL rights deal finally hunted down

So the mail is in, and the mystical billion-dollar mark has been obliterated. Like when petrol tipped over a dollar a litre, or the years ticked past 2000, people’s fascination with big round numbers makes this a milestone day.

Rugby league will be scrambling for the role of jilted lover once again, demanding through a stream of tears to know what that scrag has got that she hasn’t got, even as the happy couple stroll up the aisle.

Football wouldn’t even have got an invite to the wedding, and its supporters will be just as antagonised, pointing out that the Socceroos have provided pay-TV’s highest-rating matches in recent years.

But there it is. 1.253 billion dollars for a five-year AFL deal, from a combination of Channel Seven, Foxtel, and Telstra.

The deal is touted by the AFL as being the best deal ever for allowing fans to access the game. Every game will now be shown live in every state on at least one network.

This is due to Foxtel, who will show each round’s nine matches live, with five of those matches being exclusive.

Foxtel will create a dedicated 24-hour AFL channel to handle the load, which will be included with their standard sports package. Clashing matches will be shown on alternate Fox Sports channels.

Their main innovation is that all Foxtel matches will now be uninterrupted, siren to siren. This includes the pre-season competition, and all finals bar the big one.

It’ll be a blessed relief to punters who thought that freedom from ads was the point of pay TV in the first place, and have spent years being done over.

The Grand Final is the only match that Foxtel will miss out on, with that prize going exclusively to Seven.

Seven will have four games a week, screened in the traditionally favoured TV spots of Friday and Saturday nights, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Only the Saturday afternoon matches will be on delay.

Seven’s live broadcasts will be consistent across all states. The rise of digital television has made this possible, with Seven subsidiary 7mate to handle live broadcasts into the ACT, New South Wales, and Queensland.

Telstra will chip in more than 100 million dollars for the rights to broadcast all matches live online and to smartphones. They’re going to need to flog a lot of fake Viagra.

The impact of so much live footy on memberships and gate receipts remains to be seen. But then, the league will probably have a few bucks it can chip in.

Channel Ten, part of the negotiations for so long, pulled out late in the piece. With their recent financial worries and stakeholder make-up, they’re instead trying to buy up matches from Seven’s allotment at a reduced price.

There’s the hint that those negotiations might just be for show, though, if Ten investor Lachie Murdoch is deliberately tanking the free-to-air station’s bid in order to give a leg-up to his family’s main business at Fox.

Just how this sort of conflict of interest is allowed to happen is unclear.

But there’s also the prospect that Murdoch’s old foes over at Channel Nine might step in to snap up Seven’s scraps.

There is, of course the suggestion that a deal of this magnitude is unsupportable. The Australian economy in general appears to have been dangerously inflated beyond the capacity of its base to support.

These days you’ll pay fifty dollars for a day’s parking in Melbourne, five bucks for a coffee in Perth. For the price of a modest house in Darlinghurst you could buy this Polish mansion.

Valuing our dollar above that of the United States is a fanciful notion, and the rates are killing Australian exporters.

With all this boom, it only seems a matter of time until it busts. But there’s a reason why sports writers are not economists, and it’s not just because Macquarie Bank wouldn’t let me in the building with this haircut.

Whether the networks can extract their billion dollars’ worth from the marketplace remains to be seen. What pressures that might put on consumers remains to be seen too.

Nonetheless, the deal is done. And whatever the goods, the ills, the just desserts and the injustices, it is an extraordinary achievement for a domestic league with no overseas interest or participation.

And please don’t get riled at me for sweeping generalisations. No, a handful of Paddies and the efforts of the Denmark U-16s don’t actually count.

Perhaps the AFL testament will eventually spread to New Zealand, though not if Jeff Kennett keeps making friends there at his current rate. But calling the Kiwis ‘international’ is like calling a movie with your cousin a date.

At least we know who the AFL will be holding hands with for the next five years.