Let the market rip on sports rights. That’s the capitalist way

“Sport is integral to Australian culture. As Roy and HG might say, ‘Too much sport is barely enough.'”

That statement is official fact: the productivity commission said that in 2000 in its broadcasting review. If even the wonks at the PC believe it, it must be true.

The bodies that run our biggest sports certainly know it’s true — they assiduously exploit the way sport is embedded in culture and media to extract vast quantities of funding, and regulatory favours, from governments.

There’s long been a downside to that, however: the anti-siphoning laws that ostensibly ensure sports fans can see “iconic events” on free-to-air television.

For as long as pay TV has been in Australia, anti-siphoning laws have been around. But they’re not really about looking after sports fans. They’ve always been one of the many regulatory favours given to an even more powerful lobby group than big sport — the free-to-air broadcasters. Anti-siphoning was designed to cripple pay TV in Australia, ensuring it couldn’t get a critical mass from acquiring rights to live sports, of the kind that drove pay TV growth in the UK and for Fox in the US.

The victim of all this was News Corp. Some might be perfectly happy with that. But as someone who was heavily involved in media regulation in a past life, all I saw was one powerful group of media proprietors mugging another one. Despite my current difficulties with a member of the Murdoch family, I was always thoroughly sympathetic to the complaints of News Corp about anti-siphoning; sadly, my advice was rarely taken on the issue.

The cost was borne by sports bodies: if you controlled the rights to a major sport, anti-siphoning basically dictated whom you could sell to. It was the free-to-airs or nothing. Anti-siphoning was a giant transfer of money from the holders of the valuable asset — mainly AFL, NRL, rugby, cricket and tennis — to the free-to-air broadcasters, who made hundreds of millions from sports.

Luckily, that began to change in the 2000s. Even with multiple digital channels, the free-to-airs decided that live sport was less attractive as content given its cost and the cost of covering it. They preferred to run old Clint Eastwood movies on a Saturday night than show a delayed footy game.

That gave Foxtel an opening: it began partnering with the enemy to offer joint broadcast deals to sports rights holders — some matches on free-to-air (and the big ones, of course) but the rest on pay TV. As Adam Schwab explained last week, it put rocket fuel in the broadcast rights deals the AFL and NRL could make, while also avoiding anti-siphoning laws.

Finally, big sport could start realising the true value of its asset.

Schwab is unhappy with the latest AFL deal, which he sees as yet another erosion of live, free-to-air coverage of footy. To which the answer is: bad luck. This is about the owners of an asset getting the most value they can from the market. The $4 billion-plus the AFL will get reflects the market value of its product, which is just another form of entertainment in the content-rich world we now inhabit.

“The dirty secret of sport [apparently obvious to all except actual sports writers] is that broadcast deals are simply a way of laundering more cash from fans,” says Schwab. Exactly true. In fact, that’s the dirty secret of capitalism. It’s just that the presence of the word “sport” has a way of confusing people, including policymakers. Perhaps Schwab, like many of us, misses the days of the vast communal experience of the analog era, when everyone could sit down in front of their telly at the same time on a winter afternoon and see the same match.

But that’s capitalism, which relentlessly commodifies, atomises and individualises in the quest for profit. Every human experience can be monetised and analysed for further profit-making opportunities. That this erodes community sentiment, undermines communal experience, destroys tradition and individualises everyone to the role of producer and consumer is exactly what we’ve done across every other sector of the economy. Why is sport any different? Labor says it intends to review the anti-siphoning legislation in coming months. The best review would be one concluding it should be repealed.