In Donald Trump’s America, dealmaking has been elevated to a highly public art form – and so it was at the NRL’s Las Vegas launch, where potential competitors for the league’s next broadcast rights deal were on full display.
Sir Len Blavatnik, the British-American billionaire owner of UK-based streaming service DAZN, was rubbing shoulders with the NRL’s top brass on the field and in the league’s special VIP box at Allegiant Stadium.
James Packer in the NRL’s special box at the season launch in Las Vegas.
DAZN bought Foxtel for $3.4 billion last year. The NRL’s television deal with Foxtel and Nine Entertainment – the owner of this masthead – expires next year, and a competitive race is expected for the rights to Australia’s most-watched TV sport.
Blavatnik, who was born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, is worth $US30 billion ($42 billion), according to Forbes magazine’s latest estimate. He is vice chairman of Warner Music Group, in which he owns a majority stake through his investment firm Access Industries.
The 68-year-old was happy to talk and be photographed as he returned from doing the coin toss at the start of the Cowboys-Knights clash, but was reined in by an insistent minder.
James Packer was in the NRL’s special box at the season launch in Las Vegas.
“I love Australia, you can quote that,” Blavatnik said as he was shepherded away. “I love Foxtel.”
Love was also in the air upstairs in the NRL’s VVVIP box, where another billionaire, Australia’s James Packer, was seated at the entrance in full view of those in the public bar.
The part-owner of the South Sydney Rabbitohs was deep in conversation with Brisbane Olympics president and former Dow Chemical chief executive Andrew Liveris, who is on a world tour to raise sponsorship to cover the increasingly steep cost of the Games being “distributed” around Queensland.
Packer, who was dressed casually in a colourless polo shirt and blue jeans, appeared in good spirits and said he was happy. He was as enthusiastic about the on-field action as he was about his friend and former business partner Brett Ratner’s new film Melania, a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump.
“I thought it was great. Everyone should go and see it,” Packer said. “Melania’s happy with it, the president’s happy with it and Amazon’s happy with it.”
A section of the big crowd Las Vegas.Credit: Getty Images
Ratner recently appeared in the Epstein files, cuddling a woman in a photograph while seated next to Jeffrey Epstein and another woman. Ratner later told broadcaster Piers Morgan the woman in the 20-year-old picture was his then-fiancée, though he did not want to identify her.
Packer sold his stake in his business with Ratner, RatPac Entertainment, in 2017. The person he sold it to? None other than Blavatnik, who was also milling about the box.
Unlike Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt, Packer is not regularly in Trump’s orbit. “I know him to say hello, but I’m not friends with him,” Packer said. “But he’s been nothing but nice to me.”
Also spotted in the power players box at various times were billionaire chairman of the Sydney Roosters Nick Politis, and club director Mark Bouris, Foxtel boss Patrick Delany, Nine chief executive Matt Stanton and chairman Peter Tonagh, top News Corp editors Ben English and Chris Jones, and a rotating cast of NRL figures, including chairman Peter V’landys and chief executive Andrew Abdo.
While business was no doubt on everyone’s mind, much of the chatter around the Champions Club involved Trump’s military campaign against Iran, news of which broke late the night before, while after-dinner drinks were under way across Las Vegas.
It’s the second year in a row that Trump has disrupted the NRL’s Vegas launch with major international news. Last year, it was his catastrophic White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that bumped rugby league off the front pages Down Under.
Former Australian ambassador to the US Joe Hockey, a director of NRL expansion club the Perth Bears, predicted Trump would strike Iran imminently at a function just hours before the bombs dropped.
“I flagged it, didn’t I,” Hockey said later at the Champions Club. “You just don’t send that much lethality to a region without actually moving. It’s the same old lesson as when [Russia’s Vladimir] Putin had an enormous amount of lethality on the border with Ukraine.
“Everyone said, ‘Oh, he’s bluffing’. You can’t bluff with that amount of equipment there. Let’s just hope it has the minimum amount of casualties with the maximum outcome.”
Outgoing Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd was on leave and missed the event, but Consul-General Heather Ridout worked the room, as did former Queensland premier and NRL commissioner Peter Beattie, and Papua New Guinea Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso, whose country is set to enter the competition in 2028.
Also on the sidelines for much of the first match was US Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers, a Trump appointee, who received her first taste of rugby league.
Policing free speech is a big part of Rogers’ day-to-day remit, and Australia is in her sights: last month, she criticised Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s hate speech bill as “clumsy”, saying it could let extremists off the hook while criminalising legitimate opinion.
There were no such complaints about the football, though Rogers said she would need help understanding the rules.
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