How close did Channel Seven come to losing the AFL broadcasting rights? Their managing director Lewis Martin admits other broadcasters pushed quite hard to take over.
The AFL yesterday announced that Seven and Foxtel will continue being the joint broadcasters of the league through to 2031, with Channel 10 and Nine both reportedly right in the mix with their own proposals.
Martin believes his network was always in the “box seat” for a multitude of reasons.
“I just think with the tenure, we’ve now future-proofed our business and we can really build our business long-term, and I think that was really appealing,” he told SEN Breakfast.
“Other organisations would be at different stages. The timing for us was perfect, but others had other sports that they were considering and other situations.
“For us as an incumbent, I guess we were always in the box seat, but I was also – not surprised – but the other organisations were absolutely genuine and they were present.
“Could we have lost the AFL rights, yes we could have.
“What’s really important here and I know we’re just executives and that stuff, but as competitive as it all was, there was a lot of emotion and lot of love for this game.
“People say it’s all about ratings and subs – it’s all about people. Subscribers are people.
“The big thing here for us is across the next nine years we’ve got this extraordinary responsibility as a collection as both the sporting administrators in the AFL and media executives in order to service our customers and our customers are our fans.
“It’s about providing everybody with the choice and everybody can feel comfortable for the next nine years, they can watch the game anywhere they please at any time.”
Listen to the full chat on SEN Breakfast below