It’s the $58m question. Amid more rumblings of reluctance from Fox Sports to see out the final three years of its six-year broadcast deal, how best can Australian football secure its future?
In the coronavirus-imposed suspension of the A-League, the chief broadcaster has identified a potential escape clause – but with Football Federation Australia’s coffers bare, neither party is keen to accommodate.
It’s a collision course that has been a long time in the making. In 2018, Fox Sports posted a $417m loss and announced an immediate deprioritisation of “non-marquee sporting content”, triggering cuts to its football department and production budget. The fruit of a 15-year relationship had well and truly soured.
There was a time when Fox Sports needed football as much as the newly rebooted code needed cold hard cash. The initial seven-year $120m deal penned in 2006 gave head office financial security and the pay TV operator a loss-leading subscription driver. With only Super Rugby and NBL on its books, the A-League – and more importantly, the Socceroos – were a comparative blue-chip asset.
The 2007 A-League grand final set audience records for the broadcaster, while the drama of Australia’s Asian Cup penalty-shootout exit to Japan delivered Fox Sports its first ever million-plus total audience.
But as Australian rugby can attest, handing subscription TV the keys to the castle can have disastrous outcomes for a sport’s reach, let alone growth. As Channel Seven’s director of sport sales, Pat Moloughney, argued last year: “If you look at sports that have gone behind a [pay]wall, they’ve taken significant cash upfront, but they’ve actually killed the participation.”
More than the lack of eyeballs, within a year football was also suffering a lack of love. Fox Sports’ acquisition of AFL rights and increasing investment into NRL relegated the A-League, alongside Super Rugby, to bastard offspring by decade’s end.
By 2012, FFA had responded, securing a free-to-air partner for four seasons, with long-time guardians of the flame SBS returning the world game to households across Australia. In what now seems a halcyon era, the A-League – with the financial muscle of Fox Sports and the mainstream access of SBS – appeared to have finally rendered “dollars v eyeballs” a false dichotomy.
The arrival of Western Sydney Wanderers brought a derby to football’s biggest marketplace; with two rival broadcasts – each with their own big characters with big opinions – debate flourished and interest in the game grew. Four of the A-League’s six top campaigns, by average attendance figures, came under the hybrid broadcast model – the environment around the game had never been more robust.
But in an act of bastardry/shrewd corporate manoeuvring – depending on which way you see it – nestled in the fine print of the landmark $346m six-year deal were provisions to preclude the public broadcaster, with Fox Sports safe in the knowledge it could still promise FFA a free-to-air presence, given parent company Foxtel’s 15% share in Channel Ten.
Plummeting ratings tell the subsequent story of a free-to-air broadcaster with little affection for football, and an aggressive subscription TV business model that prioritised market-share capture over return-on-investment for the myriad offerings within its stable.
As football’s key stakeholders went to war with each other over the governance of the game, the offering from the chief broadcaster grew stale – demanding more of its reduced production team with every season.
And so to Covid-19 – a historically unparalleled disruption to professional sport, undoubtedly. But does it also offer a gilt-edged opportunity to reframe football’s broadcast mix, and thus its status in Australia?
A lot has changed since 2016. With more than a billion fans tuning into last year’s World Cup in France, the Matildas are a hugely undervalued commercial property, amid a global context in which women’s football is booming. By bundling the W-League and Matildas’ rights together, FFA could offer a large global audience, especially in Europe and the US, to both local and overseas broadcasters.
In an increasingly fragmented media landscape new players are emerging – including Optus, which has not shied from investing in football since its aggressive play to strip Fox Sports of Premier League rights.
Faced with the prospect of lawyers at 12 paces, Fox Sports might be amenable to a reduced fee for its rights, in exchange for concessions that enable the return of a free-to-air presence that values the game, and with additional room for new partners through digital or overseas rights.
The devil would inevitably be in the detail, but Fox Sports’ position as the kingmaker of Australian sport – fuelled by years of unsustainable largesse – has never looked more open to challenge.
And unlike domestic competitors, football’s truly global power may yet be brought to bear. This week the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, suggested the sport’s governing body could be prepared to underwrite the game at a regional level. Given the FFA CEO James Johnson’s strong connections inside AFC and Fifa, the rivers of gold could yet flow again.
Whether FFA can pull it all together remains the $58m question. But while rugby league drifts between NRL Island and the “Penrith bubble”, and rugby union goes into Fox Sports-fuelled meltdown, football could just emerge from this period of furlough an unlikely winner.
