sport news How a shocking mistake by Peter V'landys has given AFL a huge advantage in ... trends now
It's the multi-million-dollar blunder that no-one wants to talk about, but it has left NRL club bosses seething.
Two years ago, NRL supremo Peter V'landys handed Foxtel one of the biggest sweetheart deals in Australian media history and now the AFL is poised to cash in.
Having just announced a massive $4.5billion broadcast deal over seven years with Seven and Foxtel starting in 2025, outgoing AFL boss Gillon McLachlan heads off into the sunset with head held high and his sport's coffers bulging.
V'landys, who hasn't been backward in taking pot shots at McLachlan and the AFL since he moved into the NRL's top job, can only put on a brave face and suck it up, but there is no way around it.
He has dropped the ball, big time.
NRL clubs are seething with Australian Rugby League Commission boss Peter V'landys after he gave the AFL a free kick in the battle of the codes
V'landys boasted that he saved Foxtel from ruin when he signed away the code's TV rights during the Covid pandemic. Now that decision is coming back to haunt him
At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, V'landys sat down with Foxtel bosses and signed away the pay TV rights to the game for a bargain basement price believed to be $200million a year over five years.
V'landys recently told Fairfax reporter Andrew Webster that at the time of negotiations Foxtel was in dire straits and 'needed an asset on its sheet to continue its viability'.
The fact that at the same time Foxtel was negotiating a $946million, two-year extension to its joint Channel 7 deal with the AFL seems to have been overlooked.
'If we didn't come into play, there'd be no Foxtel,' V'landys said.
To which NRL club bosses could rightly have asked, 'And how is this our problem? We're a professional sporting organisation, not a charity.'
Just as they are now asking questions about the free-to-air deal with Channel Nine that V'landys signed off on last December.
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan ran rings around V'landys when he signed a deal that gives his code a $240-million-a-year advantage over the NRL - with that money sure to be put to use converting more kids to Aussie Rules in rugby league's heartlands
The Swans may have been smashed in the AFL grand final (pictured), but the fact they made it to the year's biggest game was another blow to V'landys and the NRL
Reportedly for $115million a season plus $15million a year in contra, it is only slightly more than the current deal and, when added to the Foxtel, international and radio rights, brings the total NRL broadcast deal to around $400million a season.
That is around $240million a season less than the AFL deal, or, as the NRL club bosses would say, $240million less to share among them.
V'landys is said to have told the clubs that he and his right-hand man Andrew Abdo had squeezed every
