The television rights to marquee rugby properties like the Six Nations, British and Irish Lions series and Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour could be sold together in future as the world’s top nations attempt to expand the commercial profile of the sport.
The constituent unions of the Six Nations and Sanzaar have formed a new company that will operate the Nations Championship and sell the rights to other competitions.
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The organisation will be overseen by a new chief executive with a board formed of two co-chairs and the CEOs of the 10 founder unions: England, Ireland, France, Wales, Scotland, Italy, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina.
It will work to maximise the potential of the Nations Championship, with the inaugural edition concluding this November with a finals weekend at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium. The 2028 finals will no longer be held in Qatar as originally intended, with a sponsorship deal with Qatar Airways off the table. France, Spain and England are among those understood to be interested in hosting instead.
The commercial rights to the finals weekend is already pooled centrally, and top administrators hope that they can grow revenues across the constituent unions in time.
“In effect, what we are creating is a commercial rights agency which sits underneath those ten founding unions,” Bill Sweeney, chief executive of England’s Rugby Football Union (RFU), explained. “There is an agreement to consolidate and aggregate our respective rights so you’ll have Six Nations, Rugby Championship, Lions, Nations Championship and Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry all be marketed and taken to market in a consolidated fashion.
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“By having one specialist operation doing that, you probably wouldn’t end up with one broadcaster worldwide. You have issues around listed events, so you have a balance of pay and free to air. But you have one agency looking at it in terms of ‘What is the best optimal approach on a global basis to maximise the revenue?’
ITV will show the Nations Championship in the United Kingdom this November (Getty)
“Our hope is that it’s going to increase the revenue significantly on that. I mean, we’re having a good financial period now. So our sponsorship income over the last three years has grown by 24%, 20%, and 28%. So over four years we have doubled sponsorship revenue. The area we struggle with a bit is broadcast revenues. So sponsorship revenue now for us is 25 per cent, match days per cent of our total and broadcast is 21 per cent. Now, it’s great to see sponsorship go and it’s great to see that we’re maximising the revenue on match day, but we’d like to see a higher broadcast figure. And this aggregation of rights is designed to address that.”
It is not yet clear if promotion and relegation will remain part of the plans for the Nations Championship having been due to come in for the 2030 edition. That will exacerbate fears of a top tier of nations effectively separating themselves from the rest of the rugby world and widening an already existing divide.
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All of England’s home matches in November are sold out, with ticket sales also going well for the Saturday and Sunday of finals weekend. There is some concern, though, over the attendance of the Friday double-header, which will pit the third and sixth-placed finishers in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere against one another.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” Sweeney admitted. “This is the first time we’ve done this. Our pool matches are sold out so we’re now driving ticket sales from the England fanbase to the finals weekend. France have sold out too.
“A lot of fans are waiting to figure out who is playing who and when. You’ve got to go through those pool matches before you know you you’re playing on finals weekend. It’s a bit like a condensed World Cup.
“You speak to rugby fans and get the impression they like the competition. Not everyone really understands it yet. There’s an educational job to do and that’s one of the reasons we wanted to move to this new organisational structure.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
