How football TV rights could affect Super League coverage

In the world of football, the Premier League recently announced a television deal worth £3.018 billion.

This is a 70 per cent increase of the £1.773 billion which was bought between BSkyB and ESPN the last time the television rights were up for sale.

It is little surprise television broadcasters are willing to throw money at football, and the vast amounts are staggering if a little unsurprising. Football has become a hobby and play-thing for the wealthy, leaving ordinary working class supporters of the game either out-of-pocket or abandoned altogether.

What is concerning is how this will affect rugby league. The RFL heavily rely on BSkyB for their Super League television rights, which last season were reportedly sold independently for a record £90 million over a five-year period. Small change compared to the Premier League.

With the RFL now in a position to sell international, Championship and Challenge Cup rights separately, last year’s agreement was seen as positive news for the fans, clubs, and the governing body. 

However last week’s Premier League announcement will come as a bitter blow for rugby league fans. How? Well the words of BSkyB chief executive Jeremy Darroch should be sending shivers down the spines of every Sky Sports subscriber in the country, not just those who predominantly use it to watch rugby league.

Darroch said: “We are pleased to have secured the combination of rights that we wanted, providing certainty for us and our customers. 

“Whilst the cost is higher, we have capacity for this increase through the combination of excellent work on cost efficiency across the business and choices over other future spending.”

Breaking that down, Darroch is saying they can afford to spend money on the Premier League rights by cutting their budget in other areas of BSkyB. They will also dictate how they spend their money in other areas. 

This could mean one of three possibilities.

As a cost cutting measure, Sky could reduce their spending on their rugby league coverage. This could mean the quality of the programming is reduced, providing viewers with a measly five minute build up to all of their games rather than half an hour on a Friday and Monday night.

The number of programmes could be reduced. Aside from live matches, Sky currently show Super League Full Time, Super League Super Men, Boots ‘n’ All, NRL Full Time, Super League Back Chat, Super League Extra Time after a Friday night match and Stevo provides a weekly preview to the weekend’s games on Sky Sports News.

Finally Sky customers could see their subscriptions rise. A price freeze was already due to melt at the start of September 2012, so a big increase onto subscribers to pay for the Premier League rights could be masked by this.

Sky have secured the rights to Super League matches until the end of 2015. By this time the economy will hopefully be in a much better state, Sky will have regained more subscribers it has lost during the recession, and therefore the broadcast rights for Super League will increase again.

Hopefully Sky’s cuts won’t have a lasting effect on their rugby league programming, but with the RFL being so reliant on Sky to keep the game afloat financially it could be a difficult few years as the broadcaster looks to make savings elsewhere.