The news that football’s English Premier League has signed a four-year deal with Sky and TNT worth £6.7 BILLION shows just why football is the leader of the sporting rights pack.
The footie deal is mind-boggling and on the face of it will guarantee each Premier League club up to £300m – more for the better performers - over the four years from the 2025 season if they stay in the league.
Sky and TNT, the latter formed by BT Sport and Warner Discovery, struck a hard bargain and will show many more fixtures in return for a 4 per cent increase over the last deal – less than the rate of inflation. The BBC’s venerable Match of the Day highlights programme will continue but ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and current rights holder Amazon are out of the picture.
Scottish football clubs can only read of the deal and weep, whereas there may just be a chink of light for Scottish rugby and our sport worldwide. There is certainly a huge debate and discussion going on about ‘revenue or reach’, whether rugby should grab the cash or try and grow the game by getting a bigger audience – streaming and satellite versus terrestrial broadcasting, to reduce the argument to simple terms.
It’s no secret that World Rugby is looking for a big increase in the cash it earns from broadcasting rights for its greatest asset, the Men’s World Cup. That is why World Rugby is marketing the rights for the new two World Cups together as a package.
In the UK, ITV have held the World Cup broadcasting rights since the 1991 tournament and I have to say the ‘commercial channel’, as they used to be called, provided excellent coverage from this year’s tournament in France.
It may surprise you to know that only the World Cup final itself is on the list of ‘crown jewel’ events – those that must be shown on free-to-air channels - under the Broadcasting Act 1996. The whole tournament except for the final is therefore up for grabs, and that’s why I can see a real bidding war beginning now that the sale of the rights is imminent. And usually the more bidders, the bigger the take, with some of that extra income trickling down to Scottish rugby.
Streaming services such as Amazon Prime and its partner Viaplay - they already show the United Rugby Championship - as well as Netflix might just decide to join in the auction and the BBC will have money from the new licence fee settlement, though insiders warn there won’t be enough cash. ITV will want to keep the World Cup as it delivers great audience figures, and having secured the rights for virtually all the southern hemisphere action for the next two years, might Sky come back into the bidding for more global rugby union rights?
World Rugby also has its own backstop, rugbypass.tv, but the global appeal of the World Cup means the rights will almost certainly be sold to the bigger broadcasters worldwide.
My main concern is the future of the broadcasting rights for the Guinness Six Nations. Last month in a little publicised announcement, the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport rejected a plea for the Six Nations to be added to the ‘crown jewels’ though free-to-air highlights are covered.
At the same time the BBC’s outgoing Director of Sport Barbara Slater warned that the Corporation might not be showing live Guinness Six Nations games after the present deal runs out in 2025. Slater said: “The truth is we’re probably not going to be the highest bidder, and it will come down to individual governing bodies as to how they balance that reach and revenue.
“And I think that’s why we’ve been in so many partnerships. And, indeed, we’re in a partnership with the Six Nations and ITV, who actually have the lion’s share. And I think what we’ve been doing is covering Wales and Scotland because of the importance of the nations to the BBC.
“The Six Nations, like anything, we will have to assess the affordability at the time. Because it is very difficult for the BBC, on that trajectory of income, to continue to afford everything that we have. But that’s not a decision that’s being made at this moment in time.”
The Scottish Rugby Union is just one of the partners in the Six Nations and like the others will want to see an increase in cash income, but can the BBC and ITV outdo their £115m per year for four years offer that was secured in 2022? Or will a pay-per-view service, for instance, step in to make the six unions an offer they can’t refuse?
And what complications will be caused by World Rugby’s new biennial international championship starting in 2026?
Reach or revenue? Going behind a paywall or remaining free-to-air? I prefer the latter but I am glad I don’t have to make the decision on the vital way ahead.
