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Opinion
“On 1 July 2023, beIN SPORTS channels (Ch. 513, 514 and 515) will no longer be available on Foxtel’s linear channels and On Demand,” reads the start of a brief note on Foxtel’s website.
“We constantly evaluate programming and channels and have made the decision not to renew our partnership with beIN SPORTS,” continues last month’s statement.
That’s bad news for anyone who, like me, has spent the past few years watching a raft of European domestic leagues through a Foxtel set-top box.
Lucky we already saw Ange Postecoglou win the treble with Celtic this season before departing for Tottenham, because those are scenes Foxtel has decided they can live without.
Napoli winning the Scudetto? Borussia Dortmund’s calamitous final-day Bundesliga collapse? Lionel Messi getting booed off the park in his final Paris Saint-Germain appearance?
These were all events many of us pay Foxtel a hefty subscription fee to watch.
(Photo by Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
Now the broadcaster, which calls itself “Australia’s sports leader,” has jettisoned the world’s most popular sport entirely on the eve of the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
It harks back to a time in 2015 when News Corp chairman Robert Thomson shrugged off Foxtel’s loss of the English Premier League to Optus by labelling Aussie fans of the EPL “insomniacs”.
Foxtel responded to the loss of EPL rights by strengthening its commitment to the A-League, only to turn its back on Australia’s domestic competition in 2021.
Now their latest chief executive Patrick Delany has taken to labelling the A-League “a third-tier sport” and routinely trumpeting Foxtel’s broadcast of what he calls “top tier content” – which to Delany, basically means the AFL and NRL.
There’s always been a bit of a myth among football fans that few people watch Fox Sports – a point belied by the fact that Foxtel’s top-rating weekend broadcasts are almost always footy games.
But it’s also not hard to argue that Foxtel hasn’t made some miscalculations along the way – paying a sizeable fortune for AFL broadcast rights at a time when the NRL was playing hard-ball, and reportedly adding few new subscribers through its expensive acquisition of cricket content.
And the costs, as always, are passed directly on to consumers – with Foxtel announcing yet another price hike just last month in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
It’s almost as if the company is daring long-term set-top box subscribers like me to finally cut the cord.
Which is easier said than done if you’re in my boots, because my household has long been home to two set-top boxes, as well as a broadband internet subscription through Foxtel.
But the loss of European football might just be the final straw. Not only did I watch the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 highlights shows every week, I also watched whatever the most appealing Sunday lunchtime kick-off in Europe was every weekend while writing this column.
Now I’ll have to add yet another $120 subscription to the $159 I pay Optus Sport – up from last year’s promo rate of $99 – along with the cost of subscriptions to Paramount, Stan, Netflix, and Apple TV.
When Foxtel lost the EPL rights to Optus in 2015, many fans applauded what they believed was a reduction in the cost of accessing top-flight football in Australia.
(Photo by Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
But anyone could see that the fragmentation of the streaming market was only ever going to cost consumers more in the long run.
Now we live in a world where Foxtel has decided that not only are fans of English Football League clubs, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and South American football irrelevant to their business model, but so too are viewers who tune into the ATP and WTA tennis tours, along with European rugby.
Yes, the simple solution is to add an additional beIN Sports streaming subscription to the list. But we shouldn’t have to.
In a nation where almost 30 per cent of residents were born overseas, Foxtel’s decision not to renew its beIN Sports partnership is another slap in the face to those with little interest in watching Collingwood play Carlton for the 300th time.