Ryle Nugent, CEO of Premier Sports Ireland, has declared the pay-per-view broadcaster is now the home of Irish club rugby and it’s impossible to dispute the claim, for the next two seasons at least.
Premier Sports will show all 60 URC regular matches involving the four Irish provinces for the next four seasons, with TG4 also showing two games per weekend. Premier Sports will also provide exclusive coverage of the Champions Cup for another two seasons, including each of the eight pool games featuring Leinster and Munster, and the Challenge Cup pool games involving Connacht and Ulster.
“I think, without wanting to sound too corny, we’re now the home of Irish club rugby,” said Nugent at the launch of Premier Sports’ rugby and football coverage in Dublin on Thursday.
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“We have the United Rugby Championship in its totality. Part of that will be that we effectively have taken the place of RTÉ from last year, so it’s us and TG4 will have the Irish provinces.
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“One of those games, either a Leinster or Munster game, every week will be exclusively available on Premier Sports, and we will have the rest of the competition as well. The game that’s on TG4 will also be on Premier Sports,” said Nugent, with their Saturday schedule set to show a Premier League game at 3pm, followed by rugby matches involving the provinces at 5.30pm and 7.30/8pm.
Premier Sport will attempt to show every one of the dozen Champions Cup matches in each pool round live, except if they clash with a Challenge Cup game involving Connacht or Ulster.
RTÉ will not show a solitary minute of the provinces’ games for at least the next two seasons and there is a certain irony in this given Nugent was Head of Sport in Montrose from 2010 to 2018. But he denied that he insisted on exclusive coverage, per se, and more that Premier Sports successfully bid on what they were offered by the EPCR.
“There’s a subtlety in the answer to that question. Our model would be to have exclusivity, but we are showing in our URC coverage that we also operate on a non-exclusive basis.
“So, our first starting point, if we can afford to buy exclusivity, is to buy exclusivity. If we can’t, or there is a requirement from the governing body to keep free-to-air in it and they’re only prepared to sell part of their wares, then we only buy part of their wares. But that’s not our decision, it’s the decision of the governing body of how they package and sell.”
As for the bigger picture of the provinces vanishing from English-speaking terrestrial television, which is not his concern, Nugent points out that URC games involving the provinces will be on TG4 in every round.
“Secondly, whether you like it or not, professional sport is built around commercial revenues, and for the vast majority of the major sports – whether that is soccer, rugby, probably to a slightly lesser extent GAA – the primary earner for that is broadcast revenues.
“And with the best will in the world, RTÉ, BBC, TV5 in France, any of the public-service broadcasters, those days of them funding or underpinning an entire sport are simply not there any more. It requires a village to fund the government, and that’s where we are now,” said Nugent, pointing out that no broadcasting company, be it Premier, TNT or Sky, can “do it all”.
“The thought of anything now being on free-to-air on a permanent basis in its entirety, I just don’t see that happening in any market anywhere,” he added. “So, it’s not a particularly Irish issue.”
Where Irish viewers might previously have considered Premier Sports to be a UK-based option in Ireland, that’s no long the case in light of Premier Sports buying back the English arm of the company (for a much smaller figure) from Viaplay.
As a consequence, Premier Sports 1 has become a stand-alone Irish channel, with Champions League, Premier League and Europa League matches all available (some exclusively) in Ireland which are not in the UK, while Premier Sports 2 is available in both.
The Irish-based arm of the company was plunged in at the deep end last season, such was the volume of rugby matches it broadcast.
“Last season we were looking at the side of a cliff for half the year. It was about just making sure we didn’t stuff it up,” admitted Nugent, who said the forthcoming season is about “bedding in” with a couple of as yet unnamed pundits to add to Ian Madigan, Simon Zebo, Stephen Ferris, Andrew Trimble, John Barclay, Tom Shanklin and Shane Williams.
He also confirmed there will not be a weekly highlights or magazine programme.
