“We have to be strong as a game,” said a ‘soccer’ insider to Fairfax’s Michael Lynch and Vince Rugari in this article. 

How right the insider is.

The delay with announcements about the re-start of the A-League is not due to the logistics of finishing the seasons or to players’ salary demands. All parties suggest that the players are more than willing to take a pay cut to ensure the season is finished. The delay is because Fox Sports will not afford football appropriate television time to broadcast the remaining games, as well as the offer on the table for the remaining three years of the contract.

Lynch and Rugari suggest that deal is offering between 50 and 70% less than the current level of $57.6 million (which includes in-kind support); in other words, between $17 and $29 million. My understanding is what’s on offer from Fox Sports is much smaller than that, and is more likely around $10 million.   

But regardless of whether it’s $10 million or $29 million, the FFA and the A-League chairmen should do one thing today: be bold and just walk away. 

This relationship is over. 

To Fox Sports we can say: Thanks for what you did back in 2005. Thanks for all the great work, especially through the early years when people such as David Malone and Tony Sinclair were the suits at Fox Sports. Thanks for the talent you’ve shared with us – such as Lara Pitt, Mel McLaughlin, Tara Rushton, Brenton Speed, Simon Hill, Adam Peacock. Thanks for all the former players you’ve given a voice to and helped us get to know – Robbie Slater, Sasa Ognenovski, Mark Bosnich, Andy Harper, Ange Postecoglou and so many more. And thanks to Murray Shaw and Tony Harper for the great work they did behind the scenes. There were some good times, and we loved having you in our homes every weekend. 

But let’s face it. The relationship has been on the downward slide since at least November 2015 when News Limited papers inappropriately and egregiously published the names and photographs of people banned by FFA from attending matches. (We wrote about it here). 

It seems clear that Fox Sports doesn’t want football anymore than most of football wants Fox Sports.

So let’s walk away.

Let’s explore suggestions such as the one made by The Golden Generation for a ‘Netflix’-style FFA TV and put our game into the hands of every single person who plays it, coaches it, referees it, volunteers for it and simply just loves watching it. 

No other sport offers what ours does across gender and age groups. No other sport has football’s reach from grassroots to elite, or from local to global. No other sport can bring international football tournaments to this country. And just when our nation and the world needs to rebuild itself and make connections again, no other sport can help Australia’s global reputation anymore than ours. 

Let us not accept the narrative that the game is moribund and it is broken.

Let us not accept an offer from Fox Sports that is at its heart disrespectful of our game. 

If they want to put us in the old box of being a ‘wog game’ and irrelevant to most of the Australian population, let them. 

We say we’re made from tougher stuff than the likes of Peter V’landys, who confessed in an interview with the Ten Network during the week that he took up rugby league as a child as a means of dealing with being referred to as a 'wog'. We also have demographics on our side. 

This is our game. It’s time for us to make the decisions about how, when and where it’s played. 

It’s time to walk away. 

Categories: Opinion | Football Business | Australian Football

Tags: fox sports, ffa, a-league, tv deal, the golden generation

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