Delany 1, Nine 0: How Foxtel Outmanoeuvred Stan on NRL rights While Nine’s Management Gutted its Own morning show – channelnews

Delany 1, Nine 0: How Foxtel Outmanoeuvred Stan on NRL rights While Nine’s Management Gutted its Own morning show – channelnews

The scoreboard from the NRL’s $5.3 billion, seven year broadcast carve up tells its own story. Patrick Delany, running both DAZN and Foxtel, has read the market correctly. Matt Stanton, Nine’s CEO, and his deputy Amanda Laing, who cut her teeth under Delany at Foxtel before crossing to Nine, have come up short on the one asset that mattered most this year. The rights battle Nine lost The real contest was never Nine versus the ARL Commission, it was Kayo versus Stan. Foxtel has walked away with the cream of the NRL fixture list, reportedly locking in a deal worth around $520 million a year. Nine has retained State of Origin and the Grand Final, a solid consolation prize, but at roughly $150 million a year it is a fraction of what Foxtel secured, and a long way short of the $4 billion, five year, every-game deal Nine had been pushing for through Stan Sport. Mathew Stanton Nine Network CEO Amanda Laing hired by the Nine network from Foxtel in an effort to grow Stan and reshape the networks content offering Reports through May and June had Foxtel exploring an all-in bid designed to shut Nine out entirely, partnering with Seven or Ten to satisfy anti-siphoning rules. Nine’s counter, an aggressive five year play to hand Stan Sport the entire competition, never landed. Stanton reportedly used a trip to London and Wimbledon to seek a late audience with AFL boss Peter Vlandy in a scramble for more content, a sign of how exposed Nine’s negotiating position had become. For Laing specifically, the outcome raises a pointed question. She joined Nine with a reputation built at Foxtel under Delany, the man she has just been beaten by. Stan missed out on the NRL rights that were meant to be its next subscriber driver, and the flagship morning program has lost audience share on her watch. The value she has delivered since crossing over is now a live question inside the business. A modest result dressed up as manageable Analysts will likely read the final numbers as a manageable cost outcome rather than a disaster. It is a relatively modest increase for Nine given how aggressive the bidding got earlier in the year, and it removes a chunk of uncertainty that had been sitting over the stock. But manageable is not the same as winning, and Foxtel’s dominant share of the fixture list, paired with the ability to on-sell nominated matches back to Nine, leaves little doubt about who came out on top. The Stefanovic decision and the ratings hangover While the NRL negotiations played out, Nine management was dealing with self-inflicted damage on its flagship morning program. The axing of Karl Stefanovic from Today, a decision Laing was reportedly central to, followed his airing of a right wing interview on his podcast. The fallout has been immediate and measurable. Today could only draw a national audience of 265,000 in a recent ratings period, against 458,000 for Sunrise. The following day was worse. Sunrise pulled 456,000 to Today’s 230,000, a drop of another 30,000 viewers inside 24 hours. That is not a program finding its feet with a new line-up, it is a program shedding its audience in real time. Patrick Delany the CEO of DAZN Australia, Foxtel & Kayo The decision has fed a broader critique of Nine’s editorial direction, with critics pointing to a leftward drift in its news coverage, echoed across The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, as increasingly out of step with a domestic audience showing rising support for right leaning political voices such as One Nation. Whether that critique is fair or not, the ratings numbers are not in dispute, and they land at the worst possible time for a management team already fighting to justify its NRL strategy. The balance sheet Nine is leaning on Nine’s defence, to the extent it has one, is the state of its balance sheet. The Domain stake sale to CoStar came at a 60 percent premium and funded a 49 cent fully franked special dividend, moving the company from net debt of $451 million to net cash of $158 million as at December 2025. Since then Nine has announced an $850 million acquisition of QMS Media in outdoor advertising, the sale of Nine Radio, and the conversion of NBN and Nine Darwin from wholly owned regional operations to affiliate arrangements with WIN. The company is punting on Stan, digital publishing and outdoor advertising to make up around 60 percent of revenue and 70 percent of EBITDA by FY27. Stan itself was the standout in the last reporting period, with EBITDA of $37 million, up 24 percent, and revenue up 15 percent to $282.7 million, helped by Premier League rights and subscriber growth to a claimed 2.4 million paying subscribers. Cost cutting remains the near term priority. Nine took $43 million out of the business in the half and is still targeting $160 million in annualised savings by the end of FY27, a figure some inside the industry link directly to the decision to move on from Stefanovic in favour of a cheaper on air line-up. The market’s verdict Total TV revenue remains under pressure from a soft advertising market, and Nine shares are down roughly 20 to 35%  over the past twelve months, with a year to date decline of 18%. Coverage is split. Macquarie, Morgan Stanley and Jefferies rate the stock a Buy. UBS, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs sit on Hold. Ord Minnett recently downgraded to Hold, with the NRL outcome flagged as a factor in future ratings decisions. Morningstar has argued the floundering share price does not reflect underlying asset value, but concedes the market is largely ignoring the balance sheet improvement while cost cutting dominates the near term narrative. Delany’s next move The bigger question hanging over the sector is how long Delany stays at DAZN Australia. Lachlan Murdoch and Fox Corporation’s US $22 billion cash and stock acquisition of Roku significantly bolsters Fox’s streaming footprint alongside Tubi, combining it with Roku’s connected TV platform and first party data to create what would be the third largest US television player by viewership. Fox is understood to be interested in blending its sports and news inventory with Roku’s targeting capability, and speculation persists that the service could eventually launch in Australia, with Delany, a former lawyer well regarded by the Murdoch family, seen as a candidate to run it. A further layer of speculation has Fox Corporation eyeing an outright acquisition of DAZN as it pushes to globalise sports streaming. For Nine, none of that speculation changes the immediate picture. Stanton and Laing set out to use the NRL rights to hurt Kayo and elevate Stan. Instead Foxtel has secured the bulk of the competition, Stan has been left without the marquee content it needed, and the network’s biggest free to air asset has bled viewers following a management call that, on the numbers so far, looks like it has done more harm than good.