2021 AFL Grand Final action at Perth's Optus Stadium. Credit: VenuesLive.
Rights On Dr Hunter Fujak considers the sport broadcasting lessons from the AFL’s most recent rights negotiation ith the Australian Football League (AFL) recently announcing a record-breaking broadcast rights deal for W the period 2025 to 2031, consistent with their longer-term track-record, it is worth reflecting upon what lessons can be derived from the AFL media strategy. This has been a point of recent focus at Deakin University, the only Australian university to offer a dedicated postgraduate subject focussed upon sport broadcasting and its management. Assessing the broader sport and media landscape The need to learn from the AFL’s success is apparent from a broader scan of the Australian sport landscape, which illustrates there to be a growing chasm between the country’s absolute largest leagues and previously adjacent competitors. In rugby union’s second year of official professionalism (1996) for instance, the AFL’s central revenue ($85 million) was four times greater than Rugby Australia’s ($21 million). By 2019, the AFL’s revenue ($794 million) was seven times greater than Rugby Australia’s ($112 million). With an approximate $650 million per annum media rights deal in place for 2025 and beyond, the AFL could well reach a revenue multiple of 10 times to previously adjacent competitors such as Rugby and Football Australia. The second significant environmental factor to acknowledge is the rapidly involving media landscape, introducing new complexity into the planning and execution of sport media strategy. Prior to the fragmentation of free-to-air television (FTA) viewing and advent of digital over-the-top (OTT) platforms, our mainstream sports (and aspiring ones) could follow a relatively simple strategic formula. 50 Australasian Leisure Management Issue 153
Sport properties looking for fandom growth would ideally partner with a commercial FTA network to maximise reach, while properties more intent on maximising revenue could negotiate with Foxtel. The historical success of the AFL and NRL has been to optimise the balance between these divergent platforms and their respective benefits, beyond the requirements of antisiphoning laws, to align with broader organisational strategy. The entrance of new OTT media platforms and players have created opportunities, but so too new strategic considerations. For instance, the widely criticised user experience during the inaugural A-League season upon the Paramount+ platform undoubtedly counted against the media organisation during the recent bidding for AFL rights. The introduction of new platforms also creates chicken-andegg tensions in rights partner alignment. Whereas emergent OTT platforms desire sport rights to drive prospective subscriptions, sport properties must be simultaneously weary of aligning to a partner whose limited subscriber base may retard their own reach. Whereas established sport media properties such as the AFL will benefit from the luxury of alternatives, aspiring properties may need to adopt a riskier partnership alignment profile in the pursuit of reach or revenue. A simplified guide to generating large sport media rights fees Despite operational complexities, the process of generating large sport media rights fees is a conceptually simple one. The first, and hardest, step is to develop a highly popular product. The second step is to then execute an efficient rights negotiation strategy. The AFL provides an exemplar for both these steps.
