Live coverage of the Premier League clash between Manchester City and Tottenham on Saturday is set to break audiences records one week after the competition’s debut on Australian commercial television, drawing it inside the tent at Channel Nine and helping overcome what has been described as the country’s “petty conflict” between football codes.
Last week’s Aston Villa v Newcastle match reached close to 900,000 viewers in the Premier League’s debut on one of Australia’s commercial television channels, after Optus Sport handed over the rights to Nine and its streaming subsidiary Stan Sport in the off-season.
The match out-rated Seven’s evening movie blockbuster The Martian and was within 300,000 viewers of the NRL clash between the Rabbitohs and Eels beforehand. The live audience on Stan was also the largest for any football broadcast on the platform, which has welcomed former Optus customers since the rights changed hands in the off-season.
After years of the Premier League appearing on subscription platforms and public broadcasters ABC and SBS, the response highlights how the move to the Nine conglomerate has taken football to a broader audience.
While the sport’s major events such as the Women’s World Cup have performed spectacularly on Australian commercial television, club competitions have struggled to secure prime-time windows on main linear channels. This year’s A-League Men grand final in March reached 815,000 viewers on Channel 10, with its slightly higher average than last Saturday’s Premier League match aided by an earlier time slot.
Former Premier League and Socceroos goalkeeper Mark Bosnich, who is part of the Nine/Stan local broadcast team, appeared on the NRL coverage that preceded the Aston Villa game last week to promote the coverage.
He said he recognises a “resurgence” in interest in the competition. “It’s exponentially grown, and that has happened over the years, but I think the ‘resurgence’-feel that we can sense is because of the visibility,” he said.
Tottenham’s Richarlison. Photograph: Alessio Marini/IPA Sport/ipa-agency.net/Shutterstock
Bosnich will again feature in a promotion during Nine’s NRL coverage on Saturday, but this time live from Melbourne’s Federation Square, where Stan has organised a watch party for the City v Spurs match which will immediately follow the NRL.
Some voices in rugby league media have criticised the decision by Nine to prioritise live Premier League over an NRL post-game show, with the Daily Telegraph describing it as a “snub”.
However, Bosnich said being part of the Nine group has meant he is often promoting other sports, and Australian sports fans typically have cross-code interests.
“When I’ve been in this country I’ve always thought that sometimes it’s OK to have competition with other sports, but I think sometimes it’s turned into petty conflict, which I don’t like, because I’m a great sport lover and I know the majority of Australians are as well,” he said.
This Saturday’s game is expected to outperform week one given the interest in title contenders City and Spurs, the club which sacked Australian coach Ange Postecoglou in June.
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The programming decisions reflect Nine’s strategy to use the reach of its free-to-air channels to drive Stan Sport subscriptions by targeting general sports fans.
Nine is also screening the Wallaroos’ opening World Cup match this Saturday, which overlaps with the end of the NRL coverage and the start of the Premier League, on both Gem and Stan Sport. And it has committed to showing next week’s Chelsea v Fulham contest on free-to-air, which will follow the North Queensland v Brisbane NRL clash.
More games could also find their way onto Channel Nine before clocks change due to daylight savings and matches are pushed later than the current 9:30pm kick-off time in the eastern states. This season’s competition is then likely to go behind the Stan paywall, though Nine has screened Champions League and Europa League finals in recent years.
If Nine persists with Premier League programming until daylight savings, the network could use the Wallabies’ Bledisloe Cup clash with the All Blacks on 4 October as a lead-in to the game between two of Australia’s more popular English teams, Leeds and Spurs, which would create a combination of two of Stan Sport’s most prominent sports properties.
Nine is seeking to secure all of the rights to the NRL in its next broadcast cycle from 2028 – rather than partner with another subscription platform such as Fox Sports – and use Stan to leverage its free-to-air coverage.
Its managing director of streaming and broadcast, Amanda Laing, started at Nine in April after spending more than six years at Foxtel.
