And when your competitor is clearly lying you should call out the obvious sugar coating with the facts!
That Merrick reporter have it a glowing endorsement in a interview. NY Post article was very positive also. If that you think is correct you hope nrl stay OK Vegas as it will fail. To think you know what's going to happen after 5-10 years Time is a stretch too far. Nrl is most watched league in Australia most social media followers made almost double profit then AFL so they can afford to take a risk like this.Neither who were tasked by their employers to cover the match, so all they did was write a few tweets or engage with the Australian media. Inman was the 49ers journo on the Jarryd Hayne beat back in the day, so he knew what the sport was - it wasn't representative of this initiative itself. He did some work for Australian clients, but not US ones.
Admittedly Merrick did reference the game as part of his sports news broadcasting but it hardly made a dent - all of them were promotional attempts before the game, and there was no follow up of the result itself, which shows that there was no effort by these bodies to actually put any effort into covering the event itself (as opposed to the NRL effort to push out its matches and fan fest etc. onto the local media).
Search
KSNV NBC Las Vegas covers news, sports, weather and traffic for the Las Vegas, Nevada area including Paradise, Spring Valley, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Indian Springs, Sloan, Searchlight, Laughlin and Nellis AFB.news3lv.com
Which led to what - not actually going to the game? What value is there in a random thought bubble in one of the millions of US-based sports podcasts that have a fractured audience and pumps out hours of content a week in which they'd be also having hundreds of thought bubbles?
A far more popular US sports podcaster, Pat McAfee (a former punter), has actually spend significant time on his far-more-popular US podcast talking about AFL, having Mason Cox onto the show, his interest in the sport spreading over several years and plenty of episodes. He's reacted to AFL playing that one week in American lockdown, the quality of the punting, etc. It's basically not led a dent to there being any popularity of the sport in America. Proving like things like this don't even matter.
Or they signed a five-year deal to get cheaper rent for the stadium. Who knows what other out clauses both that contract and the sponsor's contract has. I can't imagine Fiji Airways wanting to cover millions in business class costs if only (say) 10,000 Australians travel to the event, rather than 15,000, for a given year in the future. I also can't imagine the NRL wanting to lose $10 million over a five-year period even if the economics and travel of this event remains identical for the next 4 iterations.
But this event hit the bottom line by $2 million. Even if they had sold 20,000 more tickets at $10 a pop to sell out the stadium would have only dented $200,000 into the $2 million loss. There's basically no wriggle room to make the event more popular to Americans, which the TV ratings and other metrics such as social media suggest was barely a dent, without spending more millions on marketing costs.
Keep in mind that they got a lot of positive Australian media coverage because they turned it into a junket by paying for many journalists to go over there for a free trip. That would have also cost them tens of thousands of dollars. So either they save money by cutting costs (by flying fewer people over) but don't get the associated positive media coverage, or they have a natural ceiling with how much revenue they generate. This positive Australian media coverage in turn encouraged the very Austrailans receiving it to fly over there.
But what's the point of that? Can you base a long-term strategy on that? Logically it's not worth the cost to fly over dozens of players and rent out a stadium costing hundreds of thousands just because a few Americans found it interesting.
I can equally point to examples of Americans becoming familiar with the AFL in a variety of manner, such as finding the game in 2020 lockdowns. Doesn't mean it's worth anything.
And lastly, even if the tree sprouts, eventually, what actual value is that to the NRL? Even if some sort of established fanbase for the NRL is generated as a result of this venture - which I clearly don't believe - what value is there at games being played in the middle of the night? Standard Thursday, Friday and Saturday night matches - which take up a fair majority of NRL games - begin at times like 4am in America. Even if you could get an American fan into the game, they're not going to be monetised for content beginning at 4am in the same way that they would be for content beginning in prime time. They might be interested in the sport - hell even desire to fly themselves to a future Las Vegas game the following year - but they're still going to be worth nothing to the NRL as a fan because instead of watching or gambling on the sport they'll be fast asleep at 4am like any normal human being is.
Lachlan, who, unlike his father who never cared a jot for the game, is indeed an NRL nuffie and a personal friend of V’Landys. He also already has, since Nov 2023, complete control of News Corp/Sky News and Foxtel, with 93 year old Rupert now basically retired. This may well explain how the NRL Vegas games got to be broadcast on the prime sports channel on US Fox (only to bomb out very, very badly with viewers) -
You should’ve seen the Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail and SMH yesterday put a real positive spin on them. It was cringeworthy. They went deep down a rabbit hole to find positives like comparing to College Basketball etc.
I'm afraid Fat Andy has lost any credit he had with the Essendon saga and the education saga he got involved with once he left his position with AFL.
And that's why the AFL would be fools to try and get into the US sports market.
Yeah I think Gil was generally pretty good with that. New CEO though might have other ideas.
Even Paul Barry signs off the segment about it with the assumption that the NRL will get gambling revenue if and when there's increased NRL interest in America. As pointed out many times, Australia's legislation-driven product fee and integrity agreement legal framework - the ones that get the NRL $50 million in Australia - doesn't apply to America, but Media Watch even lets the audience assume that that isn't the case!
I get that Media Watch is a TV show about the media and not sports or sport strategy, but it is very telling that even they - who operate as a fact-checker of sorts - are even falling victim to this NRL PR uncritically (of which they criticise the NRL PR in the segment itself!).
Yep to me it is a case of "Tell em they are dreaming" if fools like shyster media tart V'Landys expect to make a lot of money out of US sports gambling on an obscure Australia sport with US TV ratings of only 40,000!
Some of the ALM women soccer crowds were very poor and it seems that they have gained very little if anything from the Matildas recent match and hype surrounding the sold out Marvel match which seems to have had little or no impact on improving their domestic crowds.
The 2026 women's Asian cup will be hosted in Australia. Just been announced we are the sole remaining bidder.
376 at the ALW proves that the Matilda bandwagon has no bearing on the sport and any other level. It might get more girls playing, but the AL has come and gone.
