Every time a new rugby union offering on TV is announced – this week it’s the All Blacks’ tour to South Africa on Sky – the same questions pop up from worried supporters.
How much will the extra subscription cost me? And how many more providers do I need to watch my favourite sport?
Working out a precise figure for the cost of watching rugby union in the UK is almost impossible.
Frankly, I spent a day trying to price up an optimum package, and it defeated me, such is the complexity of subscriptions, one-off offers and bundles of the different platforms and streaming services from a multitude of providers: ITV, BBC, S4C, TNT Sports/HBO Max, Premier Sports, Sky, RugbyPass and, until recently, Prime Video.
The digital age has not only dramatically increased the number of ways to view – on your TV, PC, laptop and mobile phone – but also the number of ways we pay to view.
Price of watching rugby on TV
In the end, I came up with a total of well over £1000 a year if you want to watch all the main rugby teams and competitions.
That’s made up of £180 for the UK TV licence (including BBC, ITV and S4C), £420 for a Sky Sports package, £312 for TNT Sports and £156 for Premier Sports – bearing in mind all of those except the TV licence can vary according to contract and introductory offers.
You must then add the costs of the platforms you need to view the content, such as a broadband package or a Sky box.
And to gain an even truer picture, lob in the cost of your TV, computer or phone equipment, and electricity.
Sky are in the process of buying ITV and streaming channels for £1.6bn, and the impact on the two organisations’ sports coverage could be significant, with the free to air ITV having made a major commitment to international rugby in recent years.
Could this be the solution?
One thing is clear – rugby is always bundled with other sports and content, so the digital dream of paying only for what you want has yet to be delivered.
So would a one-stop shop for rugby, with a single subscription, be a good idea, and is it even possible?
To even begin to make a judgement would require rugby’s governing bodies and the TV companies to publish all the details of their contracts, plus all the viewing figures. This rarely happens.
Richard Sweeney, the chief executive of Premier Sports based in Dublin, says a single provider is unlikely, and might actually make the situation worse.
“We are one of the players in the rugby market,” Sweeney told The i Paper, “and we have a significant number of rights, with some further news coming in the next few days.
“You can get Premier Sports at £12.99 a month, and we have 10 months of rugby, 600 matches, and I think that’s good value. I would love to have got Sanzaar [the southern-hemisphere deal recently extended by Sky], but we weren’t successful in that bid. We have a Premier rugby channel available to two million homes on Virgin, and I’d like to get more availability on that side.
“By valuing EPCR [European rugby] and URC, I am able to then go in and purchase Top 14 [in France]. If I tried to do that on its own, it probably wouldn’t work. If there was a one-subscription rugby channel, people could be paying more for it. That becomes unfair for the consumer.
“Is there ever a stage where just the one player may come up? It can happen, because it’s an open market. ITV now is quite interesting, in their free-to-air rugby, which is great for the consumer, and who knows what’s going to happen in the future, with Sky buying ITV.
“But whether one broadcaster has room to cover everything is always quite difficult, especially with clashes of competitions. Why is there not just one movie streaming company? In the nature of the world we live in, it is probably not going to happen.”
Why fans are well and truly fed up
As Jez Denton, the co-founder of the Saracens pod “Fezcast” points out, we have come a long way from the days of three TV channels and the occasional live Five Nations match plus BBC’s “Rugby Special” on a Sunday afternoon.
But Denton also sums up the feelings expressed by many upset fans.
“I’ve got HBO Max for the Prem,” Denton told The i Paper. “That means I can watch the cycling too, and I happen to love the Tour de France, so that’s good.
“But then I like cricket as well, and I’m not going to see half as much cricket unless it’s the Hundred [on BBC], which is a bit of a joke. I like motorsport, but you’ve got endurance cars on one channel, motorbikes on another, F1 on another. And my wife will tell you I’d happily watch tiddlywinks if it was on the telly, because I love my sport.
“But I can’t say I’ll pay £32 for HBO Max, and other members of the family have Amazon and Apple, and now let’s pay £45 for Sky. We’re already paying close to £100 a month.
“I can understand the administrator of a sport who goes out for the best deals that might mean you’re going to get X amount for this, X amount for that and X from another, and not go to one supplier who says they want to give 75 per cent of what you’d get from all three.
“I just don’t know whether those who run sports in this country have seen pound signs being thrown in front of them, and they’re not really thinking about the people, because at some point they’re going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, with the cost of living going up.”
Who shows what, and for how much?
ITV have all England’s men’s matches live, including those in the Six Nations, plus the entire Nations Championship and 2027 World Cup, making them the most significant UK rugby union broadcaster, audience wise, plus selected Gallagher Prem matches including the final. BBC have other Six Nations rights, and are prominent in showing the women’s game.
The cost: Routinely described as “free to air”, ITV, BBC and S4C (the channel with a range of Welsh matches) are essentially available to those who pay the UK licence fee, at £180 a year.
TNT Sports have the Gallagher Prem and Jaecoo PWR (Premiership Women’s Rugby), bundled with Champions League football, Grand Slam tennis and many other sports. They showed 146 live rugby matches last season, broadcast live on TNT Sports or the streaming platform HBO Max. But they have lost the autumn internationals to ITV as part of the new Nations Championship.
The cost: You can get TNT Sports in the UK at various rates bundled with BT/EE broadband, or via Sky or Virgin Media. A standalone streaming subscription is £25.99 a month for 12 months, or £30.99 a month cancellable.
Premier Sports last season showed 80 European fixtures including all of the Investec Champions Cup, 151 United Rugby Championship (URC) matches, the French Top 14 and action from MLR in the USA and Japan League One.
The cost: Available in the UK starting at £11.99 per month on Sky, Virgin, STV Player, and Prime Video – in each case on top of however much you are paying for the platform – or via apps on phones and various TV devices.
Sky Sports last week announced the All Blacks’ tour of South Africa, extending a long-time link with Sanzaar in the southern hemisphere. However, it is not yet known if Sky will have next year’s British & Irish Lions women’s tour, or the men’s Lions in 2029.
The cost: Amid a multitude of payment plans, three core options for rugby union are £35 a month including Sky Essential TV for new customers on a 24-month term, existing Sky customers £24 a month to add the sports channels on a 24-month contract,; or watch via NOW at £27.99 per month with a 12-month minimum term.
RugbyPass, which is owned by World Rugby, occasionally airs for free matches such as France A v England XV that no one else picks up the rights to, while other content needs a subscription.
Rugby has also come and gone on Amazon Prime, while Netflix had two series of the Six Nations “Full Contact” documentary, now cancelled – meaning some oval-ball fans had subscriptions they no longer need.
When Premier Sports bought the rights to rugby’s Champions Cup and Challenge Cup two years ago, it was good for existing Welsh and Scottish subscribers, but not for the likes of Denton in England who baulked at the additional cost to watch Saracens in Europe.
Some people find loopholes like using others’ logins or dodgy fire sticks, but that undermines the whole system.
Another problem is signing up for a supplier when you are not sure of their future plans. For instance, it is not yet known if Sky will have next year’s British & Irish Lions women’s tour, or the men’s Lions in 2029.
“If you had one provider to just do everything rugby, and you could pay a reasonable amount for that, it would make so much more sense,” Denton says.
“You know you’d be hitting your core market. The technology is there to have a standalone channel. At the moment, somebody’s going to lose out somewhere.”
Sweeney reckons, on balance, a subscription makes more sense than pay-per-view.
“There will always be someone who says they just want one match, not a whole month,” he says. “But it is down to economics. Last week we showed Arsenal against Real Betis and we got big numbers. And I guarantee a lot of them would be rugby supporters.”
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Sweeney also cites the “disaster” of France’s Ligue 1 football contract with Dazn as ways in which projections can go wrong.
“At the end of the day,” Sweeney says, “our subscriptions pay for the rights which go back into rugby. We invest a significant amount of money in our talent and our production, too. It’s not just rights.”
For now, it seems, the rugby fan needs to be as light on their feet in their financial planning as any top fly-half.