3. Murdoch & Rugby
A key case study in Murdoch's involvement in sport, underlining the apocalyptic views of the culturalists - and the sports fan -
is surely the way he has exerted a stranglehold on the two codes of rugby.
Despite the cultural discourse, the media analysts and business press rarely consider sport as a cultural activity but as a product. Yet consider the impact of "SuperLeague" in Australia. Murdoch's News Limited in Australia became convinced Rugby League, based on twin (local and complementary) leagues in both New South Wales and Queensland, was a sport which could generate pay-TV subscriptions.
It arrived at this conclusion following discussions with the Brisbane Broncos, a private 'franchise' club - which allowed the NSWRL to adopt a 'national' league format, to the detriment of the Queensland League.
Ken Cowley, head of News Limited's Australian operations insisted that if they were going to spend A$60m on rugby league, as proposed, "News Limited wanted some control over the game" (Nauright and Phillips, 1997).
Super League was based not on the traditional, fan-led model of club ownership traditional in Australian sports,
but instead on private, US-style franchises that are run for profit with fewer teams -
each being granted territorial rights - and market zones. In addition for such exclusivity, league-wide merchandising deals and advertisement revenues were pooled through joint marketing arrangements. Indeed the Super League concept was seen as being spread globally. Rugby League was similarly remodelled in other countries (most notably Britain and 'Europe' with the establishment of a team in Paris) and the sport was heavily marketed in areas where it was not already being played.
The results have been bitterly opposed by fans world wide, not least in Australia where supporters were used to exercising democratic control and participating in social activities organised around the sports club itself.
In terms of the impact on the sport, 'civil war' would be a cliched term which, in this instance would not be misplaced.
The ARL (formerly the NSWRL, which itself had trampled on its Queensland 'sister' league) and Murdoch's bete noire, Kerry Packer stoutly opposed the setting up of Super League. Murdoch however launched on a strategy of signing as many clubs, players, officials, coaches and referees as possible, including those in England and New Zealand, thereby effectively controlling international fixtures.
The net result was a bloody court battle. As the Nauright and Phillips (1997) paper states:
"The fight...pitted player against player, club against club, city against city, state against state, country against country, pay-television operator against pay-television operator, phone company against phone company, and media mogul against media mogul."
Interestingly, the authors do not claim the result was to pit fan against fan.
Rowe (1997) describes the impact on the sport as "cataclysmic" - at one stage the Australian Courts outlawed Super League players (branded as "rebels" against Packer's "loyalists" by Packer: ironic with it coming from the man who almost split cricket in two during the 1970s with the Cricket 'Circus').
An inevitable phase of rival leagues came into being, but the game was irreversibly changed. Players who had spent their careers together on the Australian national team found themselves divided by accusations of dishonour and greed. Dismal TV ratings and attendance figures soon became the norm in both leagues, whilst team expenses soared.
Prior to that the Australian Court found that News Limited had been guilty of "deceit, dishonesty and duplicity" with a "meticulously planned operation, involving secrecy, suddenness and deception".
Despite the ARL (and Packer's) attempts to persuade the fans that they were the custodians of the sport, Murdoch and Packer met on the former's yacht and hatched a compromise deal which "shocked" the ARL's chair - who resigned, as well as the fans. Rowe (1997) comments "All the ARL's and Packer's rhetoric about the people's game, loyalty and tradition was ultimately subordinated by individual economic interests."
Almost as soon as the yacht deal was brokered, News Limited contacted various senior figures in Australian Rugby Union to, in the words of Business Week (September 11 1995), "reassure" them that Murdoch was ready to enter Rugby Union too.
The report suggests
"It was as if Murdoch had created a distraction with Super League...while he was garnering even more money for rugby union, an international code with wider appeal".
Business Week reports that "when those first News Ltd calls came in April (of 1996), rugby union literally had nothing to sell" but less than a month later Australia annnounced the end of amateurism. Shortly after, the competition schedules of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa had been torn apart and restructured into a package of southern hemisphere competitions.
Just four days after the rugby unions of the southern hemisphere had met Sam Chisholm, a new governing body SANZAR had been formed. Six weeks after that Murdoch agreed to pay US$50m over 10 years for exclusive world rights to all rugby in those three countries.
As with rugby league, capturing Union as a global sport is what drove Murdoch. In June, Murdoch's final phase of his master plan almost split the northern hemisphere game in two, and the reverberations continue to this very day, even whilst he begins to turn his attentions to the next phase of his plans to exert control over association football.