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If you were a struggling TV network and you needed to design a sport to attract viewers/subscribers, what ingredients would you include?
Australian pay TV needs a mid-week winter sport played at night (Tuesday to Thursday) to gain more eyeballs as that is an untapped frontier as most folks are home in the cold watching TV.
Monday night NRL on Fox (and this year Thursday night NRL on free-to-air) are part of this strategy but generally there are three barren midweek nights on TV for sport.
Basketball was allegedly the answer but couldn’t crack it in winter and the Asian Cup for soccer was also going to be a winner, just not yet.
Lets take a look at the US, UK and Australian scene to see what works.
In the US, the NFL football generates the highest ratings per game despite being played generally on a Sunday afternoon.
The toughness of the game result in a short 16-game season with generally one week turnarounds, but games are (sometimes) spread over two or three nights and Sunday afternoon.
The other sports (Baseball, ice hockey and basketball) all have longer seasons and can be played more than once a week but have the benefit of being played midweek when pay-TV cable needs content to fill those (in some cases) long cold nights in the US northern States.
Hence basketball, with a 70-game season and teams playing up to three times a week in deep winter, is also fantastic TV content midweek. The UK, of course, has a plethora of mid week soccer competitions.
In Australia, NRL is arguably the highest rating TV sport, obviously along with the AFL. The reason TV executives like NRL is because (like the NFL) the play is always on the screen, the hits are big and the nature of the game means the scores are close.
Those three ingredients that make NRL a TV success are also its partial Achilles’ Heel.
The closeness of the scores (aside from the salary cap) occurs because its designed to be a ‘my ball, now your ball’ situation so even a team getting beaten heavily will have a chance with the ball for six tackles.
Of course in the other football codes, a team can dominate possession and score heavily (although the difficulty of scoring goals in soccer means teams stay in games longer).
In this sense NRL mimics NFL and basketball.
While this possession sharing does guarantee closer games, some see it as predictable.
This is especially so if despite the sharing of possession, one team gets a long way in front of the opposition and with the sharing possession situation, the losing team has little chance to make up the difference.
Paradoxically then, this sharing equation means that the game is decided early and people will use the remote quickly to find other entertainment and drama.
The NFL has changed the laws over the years to allow teams to take risks to allow well beaten teams to attempt to make up the difference (e.g. the two point conversion).
Teams have developed hurry-up offences and timeout strategies to maximise their opportunities if they are behind on the scoreboard.
Basketball even has the odd occurrence in the scoring system of teams fouling to get the ball back, even though their opponents get a shot at goal.
The NFL last year had the equally odd occurrence of letting an opposing team score to give them enough time to regain possession and end the game with their chance at scoring.
The NRL has also changed the rules to try to make the game less predictable, for example allowing stripping the ball in certain circumstances, the 40-20 rule and the optional conversion.
Apart from the Footy shows migrating to Pay-TV, what else will attract viewers?
Perhaps the hybrid rugby league/union game that Bob Dwyer and the Ella brothers were developing could be summer sport fodder?
It would however be unlikely to have legs in winter and may in any case be only partially attractive to half the country. Mixed martial arts and boxing on midweek nights don’t normally cut it for the affluent punters who can afford Pay-TV and like sport.
So what sport should Pay TV invent to try to lure new customers?
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