Nine’s audacious 11th-hour bid to wrest the AFL broadcast rights from Foxtel and Seven was ultimately too little, too late.
But according to sources close to the contract negotiations, Nine’s pitch – which was tabled over the weekend by the network’s chief executive Mike Sneesby – provoked a conversation about how Nine could possibly juggle holding both NRL and AFL rights given the certain clash of key games each weekend.
It was unclear how Nine would satisfactorily broadcast blockbuster AFL games on Thursday and Friday nights when it is already committed to airing NRL matches at the same time.
Industry sources, who were stunned when Nine walked away from its decades-long partnership with Cricket Australia in favour of tennis four years ago, suggest the question must have been raised in the negotiations over AFL rights.
Mr Sneesby unexpectedly flew to Melbourne on Monday to pitch Nine’s 11th-hour bid to AFL executives, with Nine mastheads The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reporting the media company offered “roughly $500m a year” for the broadcast rights to the sport.
The Australian has confirmed that Nine’s final bid was in fact well above $500m a year. In the end, though, the financial package offered by Nine fell well short of the figures put forward by Seven, Foxtel, and the one-company bid by Ten and its streaming platform Paramount+.
It’s understood Nine was eyeing off the rights to the AFL as a means to establish its streaming platform Stan as a player in the competitive sports streaming market.
As it stands, Stan is without the streaming rights to either major football code in Australia, which is a significant impairment to its push to be commercially competitive with Foxtel and its sports streaming platform Kayo, which have the broadcast rights to both AFL and NRL. Having failed to secure a top tier winter code, Stan’s main sports offerings are rugby union, Indycar, and the Australian Open tennis in January.
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