EARLIER this week, Premiership Rugby announced a new five-season broadcast deal with TNT Sports.
What does this have to do with rugby league, I can already hear you asking? Well, stick with me on this on and all will be explained.
The contract runs from 2026 – there’s a date which should be in the minds of Betfred Super League followers, as it is the final year of the current broadcast and title sponship deals – to the end of the 2030/31 season, although details on the actual value of the contract are somewhat vague.
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The only figures which seem to have been mentioned anywhere appeared in The Daily Telegraph on April 25 are “just shy” of a total value of £200million and rising to an annual instalment of “close to” £40million by the end of the deal.
Premiership Rugby’s present two-season agreement with TNT is worth around £33million per season, nearly £11.5million per year more than Super League is getting as part of it’s current three-season deal with Sky Sports.
Both competitions have suffered post-pandemic drops in broadcast income, having been getting £40million per season each from their respective UK partners between 2017 and 2021. Yet Super League has suffered the biggest annual fall, compared to an 8.3 percent dip for the Premiership.
That rugby union’s top-tier club competition’s domestic rights are now creeping back towards, if not quite matching, that 2017-21 peak shows the direction Super League should be aiming in, particularly if the NRL come on board.
Like Super League, Premiership Rugby now has all 93 matches broadcast on TNT and via its own streaming platform PRTV, with seven live games a season, including the Premiership final, shown live by free-to-air broadcaster ITV.
Given that Super League has all 168 games per season live, including the play-offs and grand final, on Sky and at least 12 others from the regular season and play-offs, on BBC platforms, it is no surprise clubs are asking serious questions about why – even factoring in post-pandemic resets – the value of their rights has collapsed by over 46 percent over the past two cycles.
What is notable here, too, is the Premiership has contracted to a 10-team competition in recent seasons following the financial meltdowns at Wasps, Worcester Warriors and London Irish.
TNT‘s deal includes coverage of Premiership Women’s Rugby and select Premiership Cup matches too, but anyone from RL Commercial or the Super League clubs must be looking at the line trending back up and be pushing for the same when the post-2026 rights go out to tender either at the end of this year or at the start of next.
Given how much uncertainty there is around what Super League will even look like come 2027 though, pending the outcome from the ongoing club-led review, it is difficult to say at this point whether that might be the case.
Matters for the next broadcast agreement are further complicated by the fact any proposed NRL Europe would not start until 2028, with the Southern Hemisphere competition’s leaders reportedly keen to bundle its rights up with the NRL and international game to sell as one giant package.
Thar sounds an awful lot like what Premiership Rugby’s investment partner CVC wanted to to with union’s domestic, European and international rights, although a look at how fragmented that picture remains shows it is not as easy as made out.
More importantly though, it seems to have failed to factor in that if NRL Europe does go ahead from 2028, it still leaves the British game without a deal for 2027 – and a one-year contract for a competition which is about to go defunct is not likely to command a significant rights fee.
Would the 2027 season therefore just end up on Super League+?
Then again, if NRL Europe doesn’t end up going ahead, will whatever comes out of the club-led review in July be enough to make Sky start upping their bids again or bring some competition to the table to force them to?
And who will be negotiating those rights, given some behind this club-led review are agitating to close down RL Commercial and, in turn, end its marketing partnership with IMG?
Premiership Rugby’s new deal might offer some hope the decline in broadcast rights can be reversed.
First though, rugby league needs to stop getting in its own way – one way or another.
