Channel Nine and its chief executive David Gyngell have secured four live, free-to-air National Rugby League league matches, each week, Thursday through to Sunday, for five years from the year 2018. And this has been lauded as ‘a good thing’ for rugby league because fans won’t have to pay to watch four games of live rugby league.
(Well, they will have to watch rather a lot of advertisements and subliminal product placement and talking heads from the latest cashed-up corporate bookmaker telling them to bet on stuff. But people cop this stuff because it’s expected their entertainment will be interrupted by jibber-jabber. You’re glued to the box because it’s actually easier to put up with the shouty salesmen than to press a button on the remote control because what if you miss something, it would be bad. People also understand television shows don’t pay for themselves, even on the ABC you’ve paid for it in advance while on Foxtel you pay each month and still put up with ads and white-toothed bookies hocking venal dreams.)
Anyway. Media commentators outside News Ltd (who’ve been somewhat cautious, shall we say, in their assessment of Nine’s coup given Rupert Murdoch is in Sydney and Murdoch owns Fox Sports which may now not have as many live games of rugby league with which to sell pay-TV subscriptions) have largely lauded NRL chieftain David Smith for ‘securing the future’ and ensuring rugby league has ‘control of itself’ rather than being so conspicuously owned and dictated to by the great God of Television.
Yes, the money is great. Big numbers. Rivers of gold to flood the bush and help staunch the trickle of rugby league men to rival sporting codes. Superstars like Israel Folau, Jarryd Hayne, Sonny Bill Williams and Sam Burgess all felt they’d outgrown the Oz-centric dome of rugby league and wanted to prove and express themselves in the greater world and make a heap more cash.
An NRL spokesman said the new free-to-air television agreement will “give the NRL control of the schedule again”. “It means we can again schedule games at the right time when the fans want to see them,” said the spokesman. “Naturally we will work with our broadcast partners and the clubs to ensure the best outcome. But the priority will be giving the fans the games they want to see at the right venues and the right times.”
Yet Gyngell and his minions at Nine will now, as ever, consider themselves the major stakeholder when it comes to the ever-vexed and surprisingly talked-about issue of “scheduling”. The TV suits will obviously want to recoup, and with interest, the near-billion dollar bounty they’ve bestowed upon the NRL. And regardless of when “the fans” want to see games, Nine will be telling Smith and company when Nine wants to broadcast games and who they want to be playing in them, and so guarantee Nine the biggest ratings. And you can make a case that’s the same thing – who’s watching these games on the box if not “fans”? TV suits know what rates. And ratings are not something the NRL would or could say no to. Ratings are good. Ratings are money. Ratings are what NRL suits use when they’re jostling for superiority with suits from rival codes.
Anyway, it all looks pretty good. One Origin on a Sunday night, why not? It doesn’t hurt Nine because, as they know, everyone’s at home on a Sunday night watching telly. It may mess with the players given they’ll be playing the week before and the week after the monster mash of the Big O. But it’ll only be for one of the three Origin matches. The deal means there’ll be 25 rounds and one bye and only two rounds in which NRL games are so emasculated by having 34 of the game’s best players not actually playing.
It’ll also mean that Australia’s rugby league team will be chosen after the hit-out between the two states that make up Australia’s rugby league team and not before which was silly. And there’ll be a “Rep round” culminating in Origin II and featuring Tests between Pacific Island nations and perhaps England and New Zealand. And Monday Night Football will be no more. It was good once, but no more.
As for Rupert and Fox Sports, they will continue to fight (and to pay lotto numbers) for sporting content because if they don’t have rugby league on Fox Sports there would not be Fox Sports. And here’s my uneducated tip: Fox Sports will broadcast the same games from 2018 that Nine does live. The Super League war raged many years and had many casualties, and lawyers bought many Harbour-side mansions. But once the dust settled, suits from Nine and News Ltd decided to effectively split it all up and share the broadcasting of rugby league. And that’s how it stands today. Like Virgin and Qantas, Coles and Woolies, if you want to watch live rugby league on the telly there are two options.
One other baby elephant in the lounge room is this: in media’s ever-changing lunar landscape, when Netflix and Stan can beam stuff onto your telephone, who knows how we’ll be watching television by 2018. Will there even be televisions? Actual, physical televisions? Who’s to say rugby league won’t be screened into our lounge rooms like holograms in Star Wars? What’s certain is this: Gyngell and Murdoch or whoever does broadcast the holograms into our laser lounge rooms will lobby like frothing mad beasts to make the NRL put games on when they want them. That much money demands it. You think Gyngell is going to give the NRL $925 million and not demand a say? Not be involved in scheduling? And not make a massive, impassioned and quite reasonable case that “ratings” is money? And hence TV is God?
Three years ago Gyngell declared the grand final would kick-off after 8pm on Sunday. Gyngell knows league fans will watch the grand final whenever it’s on. By putting the game on at prime time on a Sunday night Nine can suck in all the other eyeballs because Sundays is just when people watch whatever’s on the telly. And around that Nine could sell premium ad-space hocking interest-free appliances and the corporate bookmaker’s crazy-white teeth.
Yet do a poll of rugby league “fans” – those “stakeholders” described as the most important people in rugby league yet in truth little more than numbers to the suits – about when they’d like to watch the grand final and it’s 3pm. In the day-time. When there’s better vision, handling, and a better, you know, game of rugby league. Plus grand final Sunday was once a great day out, a bit like the Melbourne Cup. You could kick off with a long lunch or barbecue and then watch the game, and the kiddies didn’t have to stay up late, and then you had dinner or did whatever, and watched whatever’s on the telly.
But Gyngell had just paid a lot of money to the NRL and wasn’t happy about it. And he would decide when the show-piece mega-buck fixture would be screened and the manner in which he would screen it. So it went back to night-time. And here we are.
Where are we? A brave new world, apparently. The pundits and experts are largely as one: the NRL’s TV deal with Nine is ‘a good thing’. As Andrew Webster wrote for Fairfax, “Since Super League, rugby league has been TV’s bitch. No longer. Monday’s announcement is historic because the game has control of itself again, determining precisely which teams play where and when.”
And you really hope that’s true, and power to the people, all that. But if you want to test whether rugby league controls rugby league and truly wants to schedule games when “the fans” want to watch them, think what would happen should Smith declare that the 2018 grand final will be on at 3pm. What do you think Gyngell would have to say about that?
Rugby league may no longer be TV’s bitch. But TV remains rugby league’s sugar daddy. TV remains God.
