On Wednesday PRL announced a stonking new TV deal worth “up
to” £152m with new players in the Rugby market BT. You’d have thought this whopping TV deal
would have been welcomed with open arms, especially in a double-dip recession,
but no! ERC immediately pooh-poohed the
deal claiming that PRL had broken IRB rules, they don’t say what, and an ERC
mandate, they don’t say how. This is
because as well as selling domestic league games PRL sold the rights to their
clubs home games in some, as yet unknown, European competition(s). 4 hours later ERC & Sky announced a
renewed deal for the Heineken Cup and Amlin Cup for 4 years beyond the current
contract which ends in 2014.
PRL gave their notice to quit ERC on June 1st, as
did LNR (League National de Rugby) their equivalent in France, effective from
June 2014. You may have spotted a rather
obvious problem with ERC’s plan at this point.
That is that ERC won’t exist past 2014, at least in current form and
certainly not with English and French clubs, and even if it were to be saved at
this moment in time it has no right to sell English club games beyond 2014.
Now ERC claim that PRL had no right to sell the package they
did either; that is simply not true. PRL
have sold the rights to their own games in any future tournament, something
they are completely within their rights to do.
After all the SANZAR nations sell their rights individually to domestic
TV so the IRB clearly have no problem with this arraignment.
If reports are to be believed PRL’s deal is split into two
parts: an £100m domestic deal and an £50m European deal. ERC haven’t released the amount of their new
Sky contract but last year PRL received £8m from ERC as their share of the
collective spoils. English clubs receive
24.5% of the ERC pot (alongside the French, the Irish, Welsh and Scots get 14%
each whilst the Italians get 9%) which by my maths makes the overall total £32.65m. That total includes the sponsorships paid by
Heineken, Amlin, FedEx, Addidas, Land Rover and the TV rights to France, Italy,
Ireland plus the TV rights to the Ulster, the Welsh regions and the Scottish
regions in the UK. This deal is,
reportedly, worth £17m more for significantly less. The French rights would be worth a similar
amount to the English rights, with the sundry other deals also to be added on
top it is hardly optimistic to state the total value would top £100m. That
is a 200% increase in revenues.
So why are ERC so exercised over PRL’s deal? Obviously PRL have to some extent gone behind
the backs of their European partners, but more than that ERC, or rather the
constituent unions, are worried that the clubs are becoming too powerful and
their own influence might be on the wane.
Will ERC really be able to turn their collective noses up to
over £100m? I doubt it, the Welsh game is
in disarray domestically and is desperate for the cash, similarly the Scots,
Irish and Italians heavily subsidise their domestic games with revenues from
internationals. The cash will surely be
enough to buy the structural changes that PRL and LNR have been so desperate to
achieve.
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