Peter V’landys walks a tightrope chasing his $4b NRL broadcast dream

Inside the chairman’s room at Las Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium, billionaire businessman Sir Leonard Blavatnik was welcomed like royalty when he arrived for the NRL double-header there this year.

With a Steeden ball plonked in his hands, the owner of global sports streamer DAZN was escorted from the ground-level function area out onto the field by Australian Rugby League Commission boss Peter V’landys.

“It’s my first time at a rugby league game,” he said. “It’s fantastic.”

Three months later Blavatnik – a Ukrainian-born British-American tycoon whose net worth is estimated at $US34 billion ($47 billion) by Forbes – is making his presence felt as bidding for the broadcast rights to the NRL heats up.

Foxtel, which was purchased by DAZN last year, has pitched for the game’s entire slate, as has Nine Entertainment, the owner of this masthead, which runs subscription service Stan Sport as well as its free-to-air television channels.

But experts are warning over the legality of Foxtel’s potential deal and its compliance with Australia’s anti-siphoning legislation, which ensures the public retain access to a certain number of games for free.

“It seems Foxtel is proposing to on-sell the rights to a free-to-air broadcaster partner after acquiring everything which is inconsistent with the spirit of the regime and possibly illegal,” Lachlan Gepp, partner at law firm Hamilton Locke and a sports rights and gambling expert, says.

The two companies leading the fight are the long-term incumbent NRL rights holders, with Foxtel paying about $270 million a year to show the rights behind its paywall and Nine $130 million a year under the $2 billion arrangement which runs out at the end of the 2027 season.

V’landys has long set his sights on surpassing the AFL’s seven-year $4.5 billion deal struck in 2022, a high watermark in Australian sport.

The speculated figure he is chasing is $4 billion, which over the NRL’s usual five-year rights period would amount to $800 million a season.

Opinions are split on whether he can get anywhere near the magic number, which would require the broadcast partners at least doubling their current outlay in a much weaker advertising market.

“The $4 billion number is hard to rationalise when you break it down,” Gepp says, with the ad market adding an even bigger mountain. “Even with the current split of rights between broadcasters, that would require Nine to pay $1.3 billion and Foxtel to pay $2.7 billion – that’s double the highest fee they’ve ever paid for NRL rights.”

But others believe the competitive tension may result in the price be