ANZ Championship owners’ Netball Australia and Netball New Zealand are looking at making significant changes to the competition after 2017, and the league is refusing to rule out adding a combined Asian or Asia-Pacific franchise to boost international audience numbers.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian Australia, Netball Australia CEO Kate Palmer said, “the current format of the ANZ Championship is locked until 2017, after that nothing is off the table. We have to make significant changes if the league is to remain viable. We simply have to change.”
Palmer said that the game was bringing in solid crowds and ever-increasing sponsorship dollars, but “television rights revenue is not where we would want it to be, and that’s essentially what we need if we are going to take the step to make our top players full-time, professional paid athletes”.
As it stands, only a select few players effectively play the game as full-time professionals. Netball Australia has a three-way deal with Channel Ten and Foxtel this year, with big sponsors such as ANZ and Chemist Warehouse agreeing to pay Network Ten to broadcast one game of the Trans-Tasman league live each week. The rest of the round’s matches are broadcast live on Fox Sports throughout the week.
“We need to just keep improving our product,” Palmer said. “So that’s why we don’t want to rule out any possible changes, big or small in the coming years, because we want to make sure we have a league which people want to watch.”
One option would be to expand the number of nations which are paying for TV rights. Asia would be the most logical option. Crowds of between 5,000 and 8,000 have turned up to watch international netball matches in Singapore and Sri Lanka. The sport is also widely played across Malaysia, and to a lesser extent Hong Kong, India, Vietnam and Thailand. Netball is seen as having untapped potential across the fast developing region, including in China and Indonesia – nations currently missing from the sport’s half-full global map.
The Singapore national team has previously played in the Australian Netball League, showing it had the money – but not the game power – to compete in Australian elite leagues. However, a combined team featuring the best players from nations in the region as far away as Fiji, as well as a few international imports, would almost certainly put on a good show, and could grow to become an off- and on-court force over time.
Getting the ANZ Championship broadcast across the Asian region would not only boost the league’s audience and TV rights revenue, it would serve as a massive promoter of the game in a part of a world where netball is still a sleeping giant. In the best case scenario, the move would spark the interest of multi-national companies. Worst case, is that the Asian audience fails to take to the competition because the side is not competitive enough and the money invested in an Asian team simply goes to waste. Nonetheless, Malaysia – centrally located as well as rapidly gentrifying and westernising – could be a particularly important strategic growth area for netball. Not only are there potential sponsorship deals to be garnered, but the nation share borders with several other countries, such as Indonesia, where the game could quickly spread.
When asked directly about the prospect of an Asia-Pacific ANZ Championship team, Palmer told Guardian Australia, “We can’t rule anything out, but I guess the cost of including an Asian side would be our main concern. Certainly I would love to see more players from Asia come and play in Australia … I know that Singapore has improved light years under Ruth [Aitken, former Silver Ferns coach], so I think they are now really at a stage where they can compete and they have some fantastic athletes in their national side.”
Asked about expanding netball to nations like China, South Korea and Indonesia, Palmer said, “We would so dearly love for that to happen, but bringing a sport into a country is expensive, and it takes money and resources we don’t have.
“What we really need is a big international organisation or big multi-national business to get behind netball as a way of empowering women in developing nations.”
