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Chicago event puts rugby on big stage for NBC Sports, AIG

Nobody thinks that rugby is poised to challenge the popularity of football, basketball or soccer in the American sports hierarchy.

But big media and sports sponsorship companies, like NBC Sports and AIG, are making small bets that the sport will grow beyond niche status in the U.S.

“We’re not looking to compete with the big four sports,” said Daniel Glantz, AIG’s global head of sponsorship. “But I have no qualms about saying that rugby should be the sixth or seventh most popular sport in the U.S. There’s clearly a market here.”

Executives will get their first sense about whether these bets will start to pay off on Nov. 1, when New Zealand’s national rugby team, the well-known All Blacks, plays the U.S. national team at Chicago’s Soldier Field during the Bears’ bye week. The event is close to selling out its 61,500 tickets and will have a national TV slot on NBC’s broadcast network for the Saturday afternoon.

The All Blacks play the U.S. national team Nov. 1 at Soldier Field.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
Sponsorship is active around the exhibition. But event organizers say they will closely monitor the TV ratings as a guide to see if the sport is making inroads. Although the game will compete for TV ratings against a strong college football schedule, network executives and event organizers expect the All Blacks team (“the Manchester United of rugby,” NBC Sports programming head Jon Miller says) and a sold-out stadium to result in a relatively good rating.
The best case rating scenario would be anything around a 1.0 rating. At their best, NBC’s rugby events have pulled ratings in the 0.7 neighborhood.

“We’ve never seen an event like this, so we’re not sure how it’s going to do ratings-wise,” said Mike Principe, CEO of The Legacy Agency, whose agency is selling sponsorship and jointly handling ticket sales with AIG around the event. “We’re looking at this as an historic event.”

NBC Sports’ Miller agreed, saying that he expects some casual fans to sample the programming.

“When people turn on their TVs and see a full stadium of people going crazy, we expect that they’ll stick around and sample it,” Miller said.

For NBC, the push for rugby makes sense almost as a marketing campaign around the 2016 Olympics in Rio, when rugby makes its debut as an Olympic sport. NBC has produced rugby games for its broadcast and cable sports channels since 2009, when it was first announced that the sport would be part of the Olympics. Since then, NBC has found that the rugby audience skews toward advertiser-friendly demographics — young and male, similar to soccer, Miller said. Rugby’s demos and its association with the Olympics gives NBC confidence that the sport will grow.

“This is a sport that has a niche audience already,” Miller said. “We are looking for it to continue to grow and be a strong Olympic staple.”

The sport is popular enough that NBC Sports pays a rights fee for some events, like next year’s World Cup. Events like next month’s All Blacks exhibition, have no rights fee. Rather, it is a revenue-sharing deal, with The Legacy Agency selling sponsorships.

So far, The Legacy Agency has sold several deals, with MasterCard, Smith and Forge, Astellas and Emirates, on board with deals that include in-stadium signage and advertising in NBC’s broadcast.

“There are not many times that the U.S. can be considered a developing market, but with rugby it is,” Principe said. “We’re hoping to see that upside.”

AIG, which has committed to be the event’s title sponsor, already is well-invested in the sport through a five-year, $62.5 million deal signed in 2012 to sponsor the All Blacks. In that time, executives have looked at the U.S. market as an untapped area where the sport can grow.

AIG has targeted the U.S. and Japanese markets as the biggest untapped areas for the sport. “We think the Olympics will change the perception of rugby, and we’re sensing a lot of broadcaster interest around the world to promote the sport because of it,” AIG’s Glantz said.

John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.

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