That’s how it reads to me too, yes; splitting of home and away rights. It obviously won’t go to Foxtel in their own right because the Ashes are under anti-siphoning, so it’d be more-or-less down to Nine.
Mentioning Foxtel is valid though, because they would pay a little bit to Nine to get the replays at a more amicable time for non-night-owls (with the 8pm starts and all) but Nine more or less have to be the lead party.
Nine might have to weigh up how much they’d get from Foxtel to keep doing that, vs. how confident they are about the position of Stan Sport in four or eight years’ time. Given it’s not one of the sports they specialise in, it’d probably be the right decision as it stands now to sublicence it, but who knows what the market will be like in 2031 or even 2027.
If Seven can not afford to stump up $50 million for the 2027 and 2031 Ashes series, then I doubt its ability to renew its overseas sports rights, which currently includes the NFL, World Surf League, LIV Golf and ONE MMA Championship.
I doubt all of those rights would amount to $50 million collectively and as they already have the rights the money is already accounted for in their operating costs, an additional outlay for the rights to the future Ashes series is a very different proposition.
That extra $2m is worth is worth every cent to just hear that nine cricket music in the middle of winter in those years!
Cricket isn’t the same without it.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out, again I question Ten, how they couldn’t bid or didn’t think it was worth bidding for.
Seven must be looking at bargain sports rights these days and hope they give them a kick in the ratings. Similar to the Matilda’s World Cup, brought cheap and got lucky.
I can see why it might not be of interest - it’s two events over four years the first of which is not for another 4 years.
There must also be some odd payment arrangements if Seven aren’t that keen - you’d think that there would be plenty of time cover the supposed $50m cost between now and the start of the rights period (let alone the end). Is it all payable up front or tied to foreign exchange rates?
You have kind of debunked your own argument there.
So for ten, it’s not good enough as it’s every four year and still four years away. While for seven, it’s only $50m and they have plenty of time to cover the cost.
Both networks are reluctant for some reason, is seven not wanting to spend big on sport now they have AFL, would it actually interrupt their AFL coverage and if they are going for NRL than would there just be too much sport on Seven in winter to promote the ASHES correctly.
For Ten, they have nothing and need something, anything is better than what they currently have, even if ifs 4yrs away.
Honestly I’d rather they invested that money into more programming to ensure they had more consistent primetime programming year round, and given they’ve not shown any interest if reports are to be believed it would seem they see better value elsewhere too.
The best outcome we could’ve hoped for under the circumstances. Luckily seven not involved and hopefully the ashes themselves exclusive to nine and the dregs of the ECB deal go to foxtel.
I’m a little bit baffled that Seven wouldn’t want the rights - I get that the Ashes comes at a fairly busy time schedule wise, but I’d have thought that there would be some value in becoming the FTA ‘home’ of cricket
Agree and what I’d always thought, but obviously not. What has Warburton said more than once now “economics over ego”? Seven have said they will ‘walk away from deals that don’t make financial sense in this market and environment’, dating back to losing the tennis in early 2018 and every sport event / programming lost since then. But one does wonder if all this might still come at a loss in other areas (company/network image, ratings, partners/revenue, etc)?
It probably goes back to the discussion had in this thread less than a fortnight ago in that Nine retaining the rights only requires them to pay a modest (assuming the AFR’s reporting on the numbers is correct) increase compared to what they paid for the 2019 and 2023 series whereas it would be significant new expenditure for Seven to acquire them.
Piggybacking on what Sully mentioned about the so-called “economics over ego” mantra, Seven perhaps made a judgment that (rightly or wrongly) it didn’t make sense to pay $40 million for a rights package that only delivers 10 weeks of content (5 weeks each series).
Nine will pay about $40 million to air the 2027 and 2031 clashes in the biennial cricket contest, sources said. The rights are likely to remain jointly held by Nine and pay TV company Foxtel.
Do we think there’s a Stan element as part of this deal? You’d hope so, at least an ad-free version of the Nine feed.
Also, why aren’t we talking about this in the Nine Cricket thread?
