The Australian Championship and SBS recently announced a joint broadcast agreement. The new competition will be broadcast by the government network and the announcement was very well received by the football community. I shared these positive sentiments, however, I feel that many in the football community have viewed the deal through the lens of their own historical media experiences rather than in the context of the current day environment. To help provide an industry perspective to the agreement I thought I’d write up an analysis of the deal with a focus on SBS’s unique circumstances and the impacts to the broader Australian football media ecosystem.

Firstly, let’s understand SBS a little better.

SBS is a government owned media network that comprises television, radio and online platforms. SBS is largely Government funded however it also managed commercial advertising revenue streams. Although SBS is legally limited in how much advertising it can show, commercial revenues represent a critical source of funding for the station.

SBS has traditionally been Australia’s multicultural broadcaster but this has changed in recent years. As Australia’s demographics have changed so has SBS’s content slate. Initially, the station’s content serviced the needs of Australia’s large Southern European migrant communities however, per Australia’s migration patterns, SBS content is increasingly servicing South Asian, East Asian and Arabic communities.

The form of multicultural content that SBS presents has also changed. With the proliferation of accessible foreign content these days SBS no longer serves as the only source of multi-lingual entertainment, and it has reacted accordingly. SBS now presents much of its foreign content online for its audience to access directly. The multilingual content that SBS produces on the other hand increasingly focuses news. Specifically to connect multicultural communities to the Australian conversation via radio, podcasts and online articles.

These factors in combination have led to an interesting and notable change at SBS, specifically in its television platforms. SBS TV represents the station’s largest opportunity for commercial revenues and with multicultural communities now serviced by more direction means (both on SBS platforms and non SBS platforms), SBS TV is no longer a vestige of multicultural programming – even foreign news bulletins have been shifted to SBS’s secondary channel SBS World Watch.

SBS TV’s content slate is now largely geared towards high margin demographics for advertisers. The SBS main channel targets older Australians, where they can watch history documentaries sponsored by Cruise Lines. SBS Viceland is a commercial joint venture that targets younger Australians and SBS Food partners with appliance companies. SBS TV does retain some multicultural services – NITV presents Indigenous made content, World Movies could be argued to support multi-lingual viewers (although I would argue is more focused on the previously mentioned wealthy older crowd) and as already mentioned foreign news bulletins have been shifted to SBS World Watch.

The bottom line though is this, SBS TV primarily services non-multicultural communities to generate commercial advertising revenues – which then supports other multicultural SBS services primarily online and on radio. In addition to this SBS over the years has increasingly broadened its diversity mandate, not just by expansion of language content within its multicultural programming but also by advocating for forms of diversity that aren’t simply multicultural. SBS has the home for non-mainstream sports (athletics, cycling), increasingly presented LGBT content (notably the shifting narrative in its presentation of Eurovision), and I would even list its support of non-migrant multicultural content in the form of NITV.

It’s a strange dichotomy. In its most publicly visible and accessible platform, television, SBS presents colourful and broad entertainment which largely targets older people I guess you can say that SBS TV is made for non-diverse people to become more diverse! On the flipside, SBS also presents news and commentary which is almost exclusively consumed directly by tight nit communities. Content that is essentially inaccessible to anyone behind the language barrier, if they knew that this kind of content existed at all! SBS radio and multi-lingual online content is largely connecting Australia’s diverse multicultural communities to broader Australia!

SBS is no longer Greek News in the mornings and Inspector Rex in Primetime, anyway…

Where does football feed into this?

Historically football at SBS played a couple of roles. Not only did it provide content for multicultural communities, it allowed SBS to add to Australia’s media diversity as the sport was largely ignored by other stations, and it also provided an attractive prospects for advertisers to attach themselves to. Multicultural? Diverse? Commercial? Tick, tick, tick! Over time however each of these factors diminished. The ethnic cleansing of Australian football presented SBS from leaning into this aspect – to the point where it was alleged the station was banned from discussing NSL records in the early days of the A-League. The diversity angle was diminished as other networks began to broadcast football, first FoxSports and then streamers. The commercial angle was also diminished as SBS was eventually priced out of loss leading broadcast deals for football content.

So SBS largely lost football. There have been aberrations from this trend of course. SBS has been leveraged by others as a free to air partner for content including the early days of the Premier League on Optus Sport. SBS even tried, and failed, to have a go at commercially viable rights deals with the A-League in the 2010s. SBS has always managed to hold onto minor rights in the form of youth international competitions, or minor leagues, but often as a result of bargain basement pricing rather than due to the Network’s interest in creating meaningful content, in a way no different to how it broadcasts Athletics, or Ice Skating. The only real SBS led football success in recent decades has been its management of FIFA content and the World Cup. Multicultural. Diverse. Commercial. As such the network has been able to refresh its football pedigree every four years, but the bread and butter connection to the domestic game and domestic communities (both multicultural and football) has long been gone, marked most notably by its decision to dissolve its ‘The World Game’ brand years ago into ‘SBS Sport’.

And then, out of the blue emerges the Australian Championship… as I will soon explain the competition is not just multicultural and diverse but relative to alternative options for SBS, it is almost certainly commercial.

The Australian Championship Broadcast Opportunity for SBS

SBS will broadcast all games of the Australian Championship on SBS on Demand. Saturday afternoon games will be on SBS TV and the opening game will be on SBS Viceland. It is also expected that special features will be broadcast on SBS News, multi-lingual content produced for SBS Radio and articles written for SBS Online.

Let’s start with what this means for SBS now that we’ve covered the network’s changing commercial and existential context. The Australian Championship provides SBS a pretty extensive reach both geographically and multiculturally. Each state in Australia is represented and clubs backed by SBS’s traditional multicultural communities are also represented. The competition also engages the domestic football market, of which tends to provide younger male viewers – a market that is not reached by SBS’s existing television content slate and perhaps not engaged enough with its streaming offering. This market will now be encouraged to access SBS TV and streaming (as well as expose itself to SBS’s other football content) ahead of the World Cup in 2026!

The competition also represents a niche community which is under-represented in the media. Despite NPL streams collectively attracting hundreds of thousands of views each week collectively teams at this level rarely receive media attention outside of football circles or local outlets. In line with SBS TV ability to present diverse offerings to a broader audience, the competition plays really nicely. Interestingly this content also feeds into SBS’s other communication offering by providing a vehicle for multicultural communities to engage in a collective Australian narrative. This is a rare form of content that meets the needs to SBS’s differing communication pipelines and in addition naturally feeds content across all platforms – television, streaming, online articles, radio and podcasts.

Commercially things are a little more complex. The key here is unknown – and that is production costs. Australia Cup and NPL broadcasts have shown that a lower cost production model is feasible so one would suspect in the worst case scenario SBS are shouldering a manageable production budget. There is however an upside case where the FA is managing the production and covering costs, in which case the only cost to SBS is the opportunity cost of program timing. As all of the broadcast games are on Saturday afternoon we know that this cost is minimal. SBS is not risking any primetime advertising. The alternative Saturday afternoon broadcasts I am willing to bet rate in the low thousands, or potentially don’t register any views at all (practically anyway due to limitations of the ratings system). The importance of managing this opportunity cost is also implicit in the broadcast schedule, where the only televised Friday game has been placed on SBS Viceland!

The timeslot is a free kick, with if anything potential upside. With no competing domestic sport on at that time (except for horse racing for gambling d^#*@&#!%@$) as well as a conditioned audience used to Saturday afternoon sport (VFL for example) there exists a market to capture here. Another key component of the commercial deal is the fees paid by SBS. As far as we know they paid nothing!

So in summation the Australian Championship from a branding perspective strongly aligns with the SBS offering. From a commercial perspective the product offers a low cost, high upside opportunity. At face value, this is a great deal for SBS.

The Australian Championship Broadcast Offering for Football

But what about football? No cash up front? No primetime games? What football is getting instead is accessibility and legitimacy. The new competition will now be exposed though SBS’s expansive network which will help promotion of the competition and importantly provide a selling point to sponsors. The deal seems to set the competition up for the longer term by distributing it to the masses, and empowers clubs to build out their own commercial revenue streams which can now be maximised at the competition is neither behind a paywall on available on low perceived value platforms like YouTube. Football of course also receives the nostalgia powered branding boost that comes with pairing former NSL clubs with SBS. This powerful mental connection legitimises the competition to the football community.

This latter point needs to be expanded though. Ethnic ties to football have been historically made in a disparaging way, even by the football community itself. The Australian Championship has always risked being dismissed as ‘Old Soccer’ and the SBS connection could backfire by fuelling this. However I think a few things mitigate this risk. Firstly SBS itself has broadened its brand and mission for diversity. Secondly the new competition has leant into aspirational football which largely neuters claims of ethnically fuelled motivations. Thirdly the football and Australian community has matured beyond the worst of these claims as evidenced by the reception to clubs in the Australian Cup. There is some branding risk tying the new competition to SBS, however on the balance I think the nostalgia and alignment provide an upside.

Conclusion

It’s been over 20 years since SBS broadcast the NSL and many have been quick to celebrate this recent deal as if it is a return to the old however, as I’ve described much has changed, although there are major upsides to the branding alignment of SBS and the Australian Championship. SBS as a station has changed, it is more diverse and commercially astute. The Australian Championship offer the network content that fulfills much of the SBS purpose. The product offering itself is designed to be low cost with significant upside to both SBS (which can re-engage a valuable audience) and to the Australian Championship (which received legitimacy, accessibility and commercial opportunities to clubs).

When I first read about this deal I celebrated – not because it was some sort of old soccer rebirth, but because in many ways it represented just how far Football, SBS and Multicultural Australia has come.