Rugby league "has blown a hole in its ability to compete" with the Australian Football League by as much as A$600M ($433M) with its broadcast negotiating tactics, one of Australia's "best connected analysts of sports media rights" believes, according to Paul Malone of the Brisbane COURIER-MAIL. Colin Smith, of Global Media and Sports, said that the National Rugby League would "find it hard to do any more than gain the current amount" of pay-TV revenue without renegotiating the A$925M ($667M) deal struck with Channel 9 in August. Smith forecasts the total NRL broadcast and digital rights being sold for between A$1.4B ($1B) and A$1.6B ($1.15B) for '18-22. He said that giving Fox Sports an "additional match from increasing the premiership to 18 clubs" would assist the NRL in achieving the upper end of that range. The AFL signed a A$2.058B ($1.48B) media deal with the Seven Network, News Corp., Foxtel and Telstra. Smith said that Australian Rugby League Commission Chair John Grant "had questions to answer about the properties sold off to Nine which were sold to Fox Sports and Telstra in the current deals." Smith: "Unless this can go back to the drawing board, you are talking about A$1.4 billion to A$1.6 billion and the gap between that and the AFL got is huge -- and it's of their own making." Smith said that Fox Sports and Foxtel want NRL programming, but the matches left for sale will be "worth less than they are currently paying" (COURIER-MAIL, 10/21).
