The NRL wants a TV bidding war: even if it includes sportswashing

The NRL has been lucky that, for most of its existence, sportswashing has never really been on the agenda.

Australia is simultaneously too rich and too small to be forced into this kind of decision, with a wealthy market that can afford its own products without outside investment and a niche sporting landscape that lacks property that the big beasts who increasingly run global sport care about.

But with DAZN set to go for the NRL TV rights as part of their takeover of Foxtel, the streaming service – owned by British-Ukrainian billionaire Len Blavatnik and heavily linked to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) – are about to bring these questions to rugby league for the first time.

The PIF is the sovereign wealth fund of the Saudi Arabian state, so any discussion of its investments in world sport cannot be divorced from wider conversations around its parent nation’s less-than-stellar human rights record.

There’s little transparency within the fund on what money comes from where or who controls the investments, but its chair is Mohammed bin Salman, seen as the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, which does suggest a level of central direction.

Everyone knows this, but most sports choose to ignore it for obvious reasons.

With that comes the tacit acceptance of the goals of the Saudi state through the PIF’s sporting investments, which are to normalise the well-publicised reputational problems that the country has – the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the climate crisis and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people to name just a few.

The closest Australia has come is the ongoing creep of Saudi cash into cricket via their Aramco oil company – the excellent Geoff Lemon has written extensively about this, using the ‘first they came for’ metaphor that we all know. Now, they have come for rugby league, and Australia has to decide whether it speaks up.

Compared to other markets, notably rugby league’s other hub in the UK, Australia is small fry.

Were one to rank the favourite sports of the rugby league demographic in England, you’d find football, where multiple clubs are owned by nation states as a reputation management issues, including the PIF at Newcastle United, as well as boxing, which is now almost completely run by the Saudis.
When they come in, they come in big time and play for keeps.

DAZN’s takeover of Foxtel at the end of last year got a decent run in the Australian press, but it hasn’t filtered through to the end user quite yet. The story of DAZN, and its links to the Saudi regime, is not widely known..

For the NRL, this is a vital backstory. These are deep-pocketed people with spending that is about to be focussed on Australian sport as the new rights cycle kicks in.

NRL boss Peter V’Landys knows all too well how deep the pockets are, and would very much like a bidding war to start between DAZN/Foxtel and Channel Nine/Stan Sports for the rights to show rugby league going forward.

DAZN is currently a separate entity in Australia, still available for purchase if you like boxing and the FIFA Club World Cup, but it has already begun integration into the Foxtel network and you’d have to expect it to take over Kayo, the current streaming platform, at some point.

The Club World Cup, currently hosted by the USA, is simulcast on Kayo, and acts as a canary in the coal mine for what fans can expect from the synergy of sportswashing cash and governing bodies who need to prove why they should get it.

FIFA, who run global soccer and organise the World Cup, have always wanted a club tournament to rival the Champions League, which is operated by UEFA, the European confederation.

They’ve had about a thousand cracks at this over the years, but have never really been able to find a time in which to play it or a format that worked for everyone. So far, so World Club Challenge.

That was until the Saudis, via DAZN, threw enough money at it to make it happen. They wanted to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup (the real one), so are bankrolling this tournament through a floating billion dollars that suddenly got everyone’s attention.

DAZN paid FIFA $1 billion USD to show the tournament after Apple TV baulked at the price and a deal with more traditional broadcast partners proved unworkable.

In Australia, that means it’s on Foxtel, which famously never shows soccer, and in the UK on Channel 5 – a network so respected by fans that they used to pejoratively chant ‘Thursday nights, Channel 5’ at rivals unlucky enough to feature on it.

Prior to that, DAZN took $1 billion USD in investment from Surj Sports Investment (SSI), an arm of the PIF with the stated goal of “enabl(ing) the growth of the sports sector in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and North Africa region.”

Prior to that, Saudi Arabia was awarded the uncontested hosting rights to the 2034 Men’s FIFA World Cup after a succession of workarounds by the governing body ruled every other potential bidder out.

The PIF is now being advertised on the pitch side hoardings at the Club World Cup, though why the investment arm of a major nation state would need to advertise isn’t really clear.

On the field, the tournament has been a bit of a farce.

That began before it started when FIFA gerrymandered the rules so that Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami would ‘qualify’, even though the champions of England, Spain and Italy – aka the best three leagues in the world – didn’t.

When the tournament began, it got worse as multiple games have suffered from the entirely predictable summer weather in the USA, which is either unplayably hot or unplayably wet.

The football has been of fleeting quality – for every unusual match-up, you get a mismatch or a half-paced stroll – and the overriding feeling is that it’s a massive undertaking that nobody really asked for.

It certainly isn’t being played for the benefits of the players, coming tacked onto the end of an already over-long season and eliminating any chance of a proper break, which will likely diminish the quality of the real World Cup next year as the best players won’t have had a break for years straight.

Neither is it for the fans.

Attendances have disappointed and the atmospheres – the sine qua non of good soccer – have been poor.

Beyond a few South American clubs, it’s had the vibe of the pre-season tours that were great for an American-based Chelsea supporter, but a waste of time for everyone else.

The clubs are there because they’re being paid to be, and they’re being paid to be by the Saudis, who are paying for something else. It’s all very edifying.

Don’t just take it from football, though. DAZN’s other central sports property, boxing, has already been completely Saudified.

Most of the biggest fights of 2024 were held there, such as Tyson Fury v Oleksandr Usyk (twice), Anthony Joshua v Francis Ngannou, Artur Beterbiev v Dmitry Bivol and a huge combination event of Matchroom and Queensbury, the UK’s biggest two promotion stables.

Even the events that aren’t held in the Kingdom were sponsored by the Riyadh Season event, such as Terence Crawford v Israil Madrimov in Los Angeles, Anthony Joshua v Daniel Dubois in London and the upcoming superfight between Crawford and Canelo Alvarez in Las Vegas this September.

Turki Al-Sheikh, Governor of the General Entertainment Authority, which organises sporting events in Saudi Arabia, was ranked as ESPN’s most powerful man in boxing, and receiving massive sycophancy from just about everyone.

Their influence is probably less actively malign, in that boxing actually needed someone with deep pockets to knock heads together and actually make good fights happen, but that doesn’t make it any less pervasive.

Nobody is suggesting that rugby league will go the way of these sports, but it is clear that this is who the NRL are getting into bed with if they go with DAZN.

What the Saudis have proven is that they have more cash than anyone else, and can move the sport to their will.

Rugby league is incredibly small in relation to football and boxing, so it really wouldn’t take much to shift the needle.

The NRL’s record TV deal is about $400m AUD per year, or two Canelo Alvarez fights, or half of Newcastle United’s transfer budget since the PIF arrived in 2021, depending on what metric you prefer.

It should be plenty to win the day with PVL, because an equivalent bid from Channel Nine would push them massively to the extent of what they could realistically offer.

They paid $115 million per year in the last deal just for the free-to-air rights, which would have to be at least quadrupled if not considerably more given that the next deal will include an extra game per round with the addition of two new clubs, plus actually having to pay for international footy, which the NRL gave them for nothing last time around.

Then again, Nine just paid $300m for the rights to show the Premier League on Stan Sports, where it joins the Champions League, the Olympics, all the major tennis and rugby union.

Nine knows that sports is the key driver of subscriptions, the best source of event-based viewing and the highest demographic profile for advertising.

Their profits were down 25% last year but they will know that the ultimate response will be going big for sole NRL rights coverage.

The NRL, of course, will be laughing if this comes to pass. Their goal is always to force a bidding war, knowing that they will be able to extract maximum value.

The status quo suits them down to the ground: they get the free-to-air exposure that punters like, while still offering a paid premium product.

If they were to opt out of a DAZN deal, there might not be as much competition next time to bid again as a major player will be out.

Then again, they might find themselves asking if they’ve got themselves in over their heads with a company that is far, far bigger than Australia and its comparatively small sports.

It would be well within the NRL’s rights to ask why they should be different to the many other sports that have taken the sportswashing coin.

It’s been consciously knocked back before, however, and on these shores too: the Matildas and the Australian-hosted 2023 Women’s World Cup gave Visit Saudi the thanks-but-no-thanks.

A better question might be whether they want everything else that comes with it. Once the magic tap of sportwashing has been turned on, there’s no turning it off.