Clean bowled by Cricket Australia, yet again

Even defenders of this agreement among cricketers describe it as a sensible, hardly impressive testimony.

At least Foxtel will pay about $30 million a year (or about 27 percent) more than under the current deal. While this is still a below-inflationary rise, Foxtel will give up live streaming exclusive rights to Tests and the BBL.

By comparison, Seven has just picked up Jolimont Street’s jokers is almost unbelievable. Kerry Stokes the network will pay just $65 million a year, or 20 percent less, and secure the right to show cricket on its 7plus app for the first time.

This is quite a turnaround. Seven (this newspaper is published by its arch-rival Nine) locked in the worst sports rights package in the modern era in 2018, paying $82 million a year for non-streaming rights alone. That’s right, today you can only watch cricket on Seven if you’re connected via aerial (which a growing number of households no longer have).

This new deal is a lavish dividend and a testament to the legal strategy of Sevens, which has publicly attacked the sport since 2020 and last year sued Cricket Australia to terminate its current deal (if the buyers were even Alex Turnbull fights to eclipse).

Full credit to Seven’s CEO James Warburton, who played blind. Behavioral economics teaches us that people behave in a way that they believe will lead to a reward. Cricket Australia has informed commercial partners that appalling behavior will be amply rewarded. Therefore, we can expect much more from it.

CEO of Cricket Australia Nick Hockley is a decent guy but was over the top overall. Nines’ decision to pay $300 million for the Olympics dramatically weakened the competition. But why would CA rush to sign a contract that would extend its validity for almost two more years? If the excitement of the competition was found to be lacking, they had plenty of time to generate more. They could have walked away and come back. They could have negotiated after this BBL season and not before.

The scarcity of voltage was, of course, imagined. Kayo is relegated to a subscription platform without cricket, and Seven can’t kick off its ratings year without a major summer sport. This was a game of chicken and CA flipped first.

Contrast this with the AFL securing a 36 per cent increase from Foxtel and Seven in a deal signed in September from 2025 to 2031 that used identical competitive pitches (an unlikely prospect of losing out to Paramount). The AFL chief executive enjoyed that $4.5 billion deal in last year’s Grand Final Gill McLachlan told Foxtel’s chairman Siobhan McKennaI know it hurt, Siobhan.

There is no one of McLachlan’s caliber in Cricket Australia, which is painfully obvious. Unbelievable CA didn’t hire an investment bank to help Hockley negotiate. Its internal advisory group was chaired by the Director of CA Richard Freudensteinthe former CEO of Foxtel, who remains a News Corp candidate on the board of another subsidiary, REA Group.

This is a perceived conflict of interest. It is surely a failure of perception management. The only way to sweat big bucks from broadcasters is to hang them out the window and make them believe you’re ready to let go. Cricket Australia, with Freudenstein as its chief adviser, hardly sent that signal to News Corp. or Paramount.

The CA reminded us that Freudenstein’s deployment experience is excellent and assured us that he was consulted only in an advisory capacity and was not involved in negotiations or executive decision-making. We are not suggesting that Freudenstein was wrong, only that his advice in this deal was either very poor or ignored.

CA’s statement suggests Hockley wants to take this bullet alone. Surely someone has to?