Netball boss says women’s leagues need own path

Netball Australia chief Marne Fechner has questioned the business models some codes have applied to their women’s leagues.

Netball Australia chief executive Marne Fechner. Picture: David Geraghty

Netball Australia chief executive Marne Fechner has questioned the business models some codes have applied to their women’s leagues as her own sport prepares for a crucial new television broadcast negotiation.

“There’s no question that female leagues are on the rise as the result of greater investment, however there’s still a way to go to match the metrics that drive the level of investment seen in the larger professional sports,” Fechner said.“It’s going to require some rethinking of the models though, because the commercial model that’s been overlaid over cricket, AFL, and NRL can be challenging for female codes in their infancy. So there will come a point in time where it will be equally as challenging for those codes to keep pushing the envelope.”

Fechner said netball must be prepared to evolve if it wants to grow. “If we want to be here and be relevant for the next 90 years, there is no question that we will have to change,” she said.

“The aspiration is always to be like the biggest codes, but the path to get there is going to be different. We have to think differently and be realistic about what is going to come out of broadcast deals.”

In recent years, netball administrators have seen many of the initiatives they spearheaded, such as parental support for athletes, being adopted and extended by competitors with deeper pockets.

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Fechner admitted it had been challenging for netball to satisfy the increasing demands placed on her sport with a relatively limited amount of resources, but pointed out this was far from a new problem for netball.

“I think what we’re realising is that our sport needs to think really differently about where it’s going, because there is an expectation to do more and more, but not necessarily, in our instance, the resources to do more and more.”

Swifts players celebrate winning the Super Netball grand final last September

Netball Australia signed an unusual five-year broadcast agreement when the Super Netball league was launched in 2017. Rather than asking for an upfront rights fee, which had scared off some partners in the past, netball opted to share revenues in a partnership with the Nine Network and ­Telstra. After a substantial jump in television ratings in 2018, the league saw minimal growth the following year.

The existing deal expires after the 2021 season, but Fechner is determined to lock in a fresh agreement by the end of this year.

That new broadcast agreement will fill in much of the detail of the sport’s immediate future.

The potential for expansion in the Super Netball league will be watched closely, and the players association has put any substantial changes to its collective bargaining agreement on hold in anticipation of potential revenue increases.

AFLW has expanded to include four new teams. Picture: Jay Town

One potential change that the league and players are considering is a shift away from 12-month contracts. Single-year deals were introduced when Super Netball launched, and enthusiastically embraced by players who had long pushed for professionalism.

But the quirks of a short domestic season sandwiched between many international campaigns has created four-to-five-monthlong stretches where players on moderate salaries are either playing for their country, or have to turn up and train with their clubs.

Fechner said that the result has been regular complaints from players that they are struggling to “switch off from netball”.

“The athletes are professional, they are professional as any male athlete, but they just work part time. And that’s the narrative that needs to change.”

On the international front, Netball Australia is hard at work on a bid to host the 2027 World Cup in Sydney, timed to coincide with the sport’s centenary in ­Australia.

The 2020 Super Netball season begins in May, with a number of pre-season events in March, including an all-star bushfire fundraiser match and the annual Team Girls Cup, to be held over three days in Sydney.