The boss of the new broadcaster of the Champions Cup says he is interested in striking a deal to show the Championship in England, but it would be “tough” to create a one-stop shop for rugby union on TV.
Premier Sports bought the rights for the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup for the next three years, kicking off this weekend, when previous broadcaster TNT Sports picked up the Autumn Nations Series instead.
Premier Sports’ CEO Richard Sweeney told The i Paper: “The Championship will be interesting, later on, in whether it’s going to happen that London Irish go back in and Wasps go back in, which offers more, with named clubs with pretty good followings.
“London Irish have been all over the place but actually they were doing great in Brentford. We are keeping tabs on it. Without question, we always look.”
An idea often been floated by media commentators is a single broadcaster bringing together properties including the Six Nations, English Premiership, United Rugby Championship (URC) and Europe, partly because investors CVC have a stake in all of them.
Premier Sports already have the URC and French Top 14 in the UK and Ireland, with 250-plus matches a season, and they plan to launch a 24/7 rugby channel in January to include action from Japan, South Africa, South America and archive Six Nations matches. There may also be podcasters involved.
On the idea of a one-stop shop, though, Sweeney was cautious, not least because showing the Premiership and URC side by side would be a challenge.
“Let’s park the Six Nations because that’s a bigger and, I think, a very long discussion,” he said.
“Is that ever going to end up behind a paywall with certain matches, I just don’t know. CVC would have that influence.
“With Premiership Rugby [in England], is 10 teams enough? Should there be more? There’s a lot happening there.
“EPCR stands on its own, so it doesn’t really affect anything else. The URC and Premiership Rugby on the same channel, that’s a tough one. You could make it work because it means there would be one subscription, but I’m assuming that subscription would jump.
“For us, we have a pretty simple model. We don’t go aggressively into the market to purchase rights. We try to figure out, is there enough support, to pay for our production and our rights, and hopefully a bit more than that. The problem is trying to find a window.
“Like a Monday night, where you could do one match, but the clubs go mad, saying they don’t get the support on a Monday night, we want to do it on a Saturday afternoon.”
Sweeney says the number of subscribers is his key measure, rather than audience figures as measured by BARB.
Premier Sports were reported to have 222,000 subscribers in 2022, and Sweeney says that number has risen.
Audience figures for Champions Cup matches – starting with Bath vs La Rochelle on Friday evening – are likely to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.
“I know it’s going to be picked up,” Sweeney said.
“But we have the huge support of all the rugby organisations – especially the English clubs have been superb in helping us in recent weeks.
“All we want to do is have a really good weekend, and that people like what we’re doing.”
Chris Paterson is part of the Premier Sports team bringing every Champions Cup match live to rugby fans across the UK as well as top-billing games from EPCR’s Challenge Cup. Visit @PremSportsTV www.premiersports.tv
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