The mail is the Nine Network could become the new home of rugby, with an announcement expected in the next week.
Rugby’s 25-year association with Foxtel, which sensationally took the sport into the professional era, investing around $1bn into the code, could be over. But can Nine rebuild the game in its greatest time of need?
Rugby in this country has never been in a lower position or more desperately in need of a radical overhaul. “Who’s going to watch a team that’s made losing an industry,” as one fan put it bluntly on The Australian’s website.
The Wallabies haven’t won a Bledisloe Cup for 18 years; last weekend saw the team’s worst defeat in 117 years and to boot the Australians are ranked seventh in the world.
If RA is to choose to go with Nine, it’s unlikely rugby union will take precedence over the network’s showcase sport, rugby league, which has only increased in popularity in the past 16 years as the “game they play in heaven” has continuously suffered.
With the Wallabies and Bledisloe Cup already on free-to-air TV, there are serious questions over whether Nine will have the ability to rebuild the code’s dwindling Super Rugby audiences, with a much more restricted competition, fewer games and fewer stars.
Will Nine be willing to put the best Super Rugby game each week — which would have to be a Waratahs or Reds game — in front of the paywall on Stan? Will the game be on Nine’s main channel rather than one of it’s secondary channels?
Pre-COVID there were already concerns over the lacklustre performance of Australia’s Super Rugby teams, with TV ratings regularly low.
It’s clear Nine, under Hugh Marks’s leadership, is no longer the sports powerhouse it used to be, with poorly regarded commentary (Gus Gould’s call of the NRL grand final a case in point) and the slick, gripping, emotive game-day production all but gone. And the network has unloaded cricket, the national sport.
It is showing in Nine’s ratings. Dedicated sports fans have tuned out or gone elsewhere.
Nine’s NRL audiences were up just 1 per cent for the 2020 regular season versus Foxtel, who disclosed their NRL audience growth at 18 per cent in 2020.
Last September The Australian revealed Nine had entered discussions with Rugby Australia about a potential broadcast deal that would see Wallabies matches telecast on Nine’s free-to-air channel and Super Rugby games mostly or only shown on Stan.
Fox Sports has been in the mix for retaining the rugby rights, but those inside the room in negotiations with RA say the process has been “protracted and awkward”.
Rugby is not what it once was. Back in 2011, the Super Rugby final between the Reds and the Crusaders obliterated the subscription television ratings record with an average audience of 518,000 viewers tuning in to the live broadcast on Fox Sports.
That final, between two of the competition’s then most entertaining teams, delivered Australian subscription television its first average audience in excess of 500,000.
It surpassed the 2009 World Cup qualifier match between the Socceroos and Uzbekistan by around 20 per cent.
But instead of building on that moment, the code has fallen. There were just 69,000 viewers for this year’s round one Super Rugby clash between the Waratahs and Reds.
Last month, Nine Entertainment lodged a $30 million bid in “cash and free advertising” for the broadcast rights. How much of that $30m a year is “free advertising” is not known.
It’s understood Fox Sports has been lukewarm about paying large amounts for rugby since negotiations over an extension for its long-held rights for $US125m over five years broke down under the tenure of previous Rugby Australia chief executive Raelene Castle.
Incredibly, last November Castle and her advisers were pushing for $100m more.
If rugby goes to Nine, it may be a new dawn, but it may not be the fix for fans who know their code is in a desperate need of revival, repair and reinvention.
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