I raised this one in the AFL media thread. Very interesting to see the NRL have decided to scale back their media coverage given their media partners were getting frustrated about competing against the competition.
I suspect it won’t be long until Gill announces deal that he has sold AFL media to Hutchy. No doubt it will be a sweet heart deal with Gill to take up a board seat in Hutchy’s empire post his time with the AFL.
For me media shouldn’t form part of the remit of a sporting competition/league. The media needs to be independent so they can report fully and impartially on all league and club matters.
Thanks Simmo, there was a lot of jargon in there- shoulders, percentages of nothing in particular, etc. What I got out of it was that you don’t need to segmentalise the market- men, women and children can be into men’s and women’s sport. If they think the athlete’s story is important, does that make the team more or less relevant? I feel the team struggles make the story that much better they should not fade into the background, but your comment about Fox being all on the player not the club did not surprise me.
There’s a fair bit of critique around the NCAA related to this sort of thing, although not so much the trading. But the profiting off the labor of young athletes, often black, in a system that does not allow them to be paid. I’m really not over it all enough to make any informed comment and will probably be told by someone more informed that I have it wrong!
There’s even a bit of emerging scholarship around fantasy leagues shifting the experience of sports fans from a cultural one to a consumer/commodity relationship between fans and athletes.
i think what happened is a few years ago both afl and nrl were working towards their own stand alone streaming platforms (like nba live pass), but then came to their senses and realised that someone else paying the production costs as well as paying for the rights was, like, way easier. so are now scaling back their website operations.
nba live pass works because they have a reach of like a billion potential customers. afl and nrl would be lucky to have a reach of 10mil between them.
-edit- i’ve said on many occasions that anyone working for afl should be banned from watching american sport because every idea they get from doing so is incredibly stupid
You have mentioned one of my biggest bug bears. The AFL employees way to many people. I know they run the sport but they shouldn’t. It’s a competition or league that should be setup for the sole purpose of benefiting the clubs and the players.
i think sports that have amateur origins have a much greater depth of story because of their connection to an area and its history. as much as, say, the big bash league wants to replicate that kind of association/identity, it just ain’t gonna happen, not in this day and age where everything is an ad. so the only connection they can hope to make is a human-to-human idolisation one.
There have been moves to allow the athletes to earn income from their own images, in an amateur sport which delivers big bucks to the Colleges and handsome salaries to coaches.
I only follow intermittently and only out of interest , find Roger Pielke on Twitter a good link for studies if you want to dig deeper.
It’s relevant to ownership by an AFL player, such as a tertiary institute featuring them studying there, to generate enrolments, or a club or AFL using them to generate revenue.
it also goes to what gets counted in the salary cap ( Hird and Lloyd’s sites )
The Green Bay model of fans owning shares rather than one big billionaire owning the lot is interesting. Probably unnecessary here but at some point it could be considered.
What is needed here is a new category for incorporation of NFP public sports corporations.
They escape the scrutiny of NFP charities, shareholding is nominal, ( the AFL does not have any) voting rights are extremely restricted and they become in house feudal kingdoms.
Or perhaps we need an ICAC type mechanism , instead of AFL internal reviews ( which don’t get published) or occasional Government inquiries with narrow terms of reference designed to deliver a a pre determined outcome.
Sport and governments are joined at the hip.
Sports bodies are incorporated under Government Corporation legislation. Governments are up to their neck in subsidising sport arenas, competing for events at the national and international level. They compete for and finance Olympic Games and other comps run by private organisations, most of them headquartered in Switzerland or Monaco ( which have lax company laws and nice tax arrangements for headquartering there)
The UNESCO treaty on anti doping has provisions restricting governments from providing financial assistance to sports which have not signed up to WADA.
That has not prevented US subsidisation of facilities for its big sports which have not signed on to WADA ( excuse is they are for the general public)
At the international government level, the IOC has UN observer status ( Taiwan does not)
it’s virtually identical to the model afl clubs have. they’re shareholders in name only - it’s a non-profit so they don’t receive dividends or anything like that, they just have voting rights and elect a board of directors to financially govern the organisation (it ain’t a club)