Seven’s noughty problems

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“For Seven, the only thing worse than winning [the football rights] is losing them,” Burrowes said.

“The dynamic at Seven when the [AFL] deal came along was that they’d seen what happened when Network 10 gave up its AFL rights [in 2011] — the audience collapsed and never recovered.

“If they lose the deal, they lose the audience, and that’s a much more immediate problem.”

We saw what happened when Seven relinquished the AFL rights at the start of 2001 (for the 2002-06 period) - its ratings (especially in Melbourne) went south without any major year-long sport to televise, though they did have the Australian Open, two Winter Olympics (2002 and 2006), the 2004 Athens Olympics, the 2002 Commonwealth Games and the Melbourne Cup.

Also not having the Supercars during that 2002-06 period meant a lot of uneventful weekends as well.