BY JOHN DAVIDSON
IMG insists they are providing a return on investment in their partnership with British rugby league, have defended their grading process and revealed their surprise at the progress some clubs have made in improving their grades.
Matt Dwyer, the IMG executive running the rugby league partnership with the RFL and RL Commercial, did a Zoom interview with reporters this morning.
In the media call, Dwyer was probed on a number of different issues concerning the work the global marketing group has done and is doing in rugby league over the past two and a half years, including grading, expanding the audience, broadcast deals, expansion, the international area, London and potential links with the NRL.
Asked about IMG providing return on investment for British rugby league since it was hired in early 2022, he pointed to three key areas: “The first one is the is the broadcast deal. Now, the broadcast deal went down, but the initial conversations we had with Sky is that that was going down more than what then where it landed.
“And IMG did an enormous amount of work to get this deal to where it is today, where the drop was minimized as much as possible. But not only was the drop minimized as much as possible, we managed to negotiate a whole of other things that you’re aware of.
“So every game being produced, which had never been done. That’s a big cost and then the ability to put those games on our own platform Super League+, which is two really big areas if we’re trying to ensure that we can get as much exposure for the sport as we possibly can.
“The second one is grading… the idea of grading and moving clubs to higher standards, I think we’ve seen in the results that have come through that most of the clubs have really grabbed hold of that and sort of gone all right.
“There’s things we can do to improve our own operations and things we can do to improve the way that we’re presenting ourselves to the fans.
“The third one’s digital. A lot of that stuff’s not sexy, to be honest. There’s a lot of stuff in the background that had to be done, infrastructure and this type of thing, to get our sport to a position where we can not only reach as many people as possible, but also understand reaching to and then be able to try and get them in our fan funnel.
“That’s a significant amount of work, and that’s just, they’re just having the three big ones. There’s been all this stuff that falls underneath that, but I think that’s been really critical for the sport.
Dwyer stated that IMG has not been paid anything by the RFL or RL Commercial in the first two years of the partnership, and is to receive around £450,000 in the third year of the contract.
On the grading system, that was announced last month, he said IMG is pleased with the response but: “There’s probably a couple of things that we’ll just need to tweak a little bit, having seen how it played out over the first year, a couple of things changed that we didn’t foresee when we put together the initial grading.
“Just an example of that being Super League+ and having every game on Sky. We built the original models based off the old Sky deal. So there’s a couple of things we’ll just tweak.
“But we’re not going to keep changing your goalposts for you [the clubs]. We want to get you all to this sort of level. Once we’re at that level, then, yeah, this isn’t the end.
“I’ve seen a bit of some of the sort of feedback of how could club X be a category A? A club category A is just a term that I made up. It just reflects a certain amount of criteria that we wanted to get people to.
“And once everyone’s at that level, then we’ve got the next step to take as we try and continue to grow the sport. So it’s not a category A and everything’s done situation. So that’s not the idea of this. It’s get everyone up to this standard first, and then we can continue to develop from there.
“But let’s get everyone to that standard first because that’s the challenge we had.”
Dwyer said there is no guarantee that Super League will expand once 12 clubs receive a grade A, as going to 14 clubs will depend on whether the sport can afford to make that change.
Asked about London and Catalans, he said both clubs need central support from the governing bodies to grow rugby league in those markets and cannot be left to all of the heavy lifting.
“The thing I’ve said all the way along with London is there’s London Broncos and there’s London the city. Our expansion that we spoke about is that we think that London, the city, is a key growth area for this sport.
“But we just can’t just have a club there, and this club in this case, being London Broncos, and just leave them there and say good luck to you. Let us know when you’ve grown the market of London.
“And you can say the same thing about Catalan as well, is that it’s very hard to say you as a club go grow that sport for us, grow that market for us. You need central support to do that.
“It is a funding question for the sport at the moment. But if these growth markets, like your London, like youro France, whatever they might be, they’re going to be successful you need a strong club in the market, but you also need to help them.
“You can’t just rely on that club to grow a region by itself. And I think that’s where there was always a distinction between London as a growth market and the London Broncos as the club that are in London at the moment.
“But it’s great to see the progress that they made, and hopefully they continue to push that and we can see them back in the Super League again soon as well.”
More to come
