The Rugby League World Cup kicks off in Australia today, although you'd never know it from the lack of interest shown in the event by the mainstream media. The BBC has come under fire after it didn't even bother to bid for the rights to broadcast the matches live, which have now ended up with Irish subscription channel Premier Sports (political pressure from the minister responsible for media and sport, Lisa Nandy, who is also the MP for Wigan, led to a last minute deal whereby the BBC will put highlights on their iPlayer, where no one who isn't already a fan of the game will see them).
The BBC probably thinks that rugby league is a Northern sport that no one outside the M62 corridor is really interested in, but even if that's true it's no reason not to broadcast matches. With the possible exception of football, all sports are minority interests, including ones that the BBC spends a lot of time and money covering like rugby union and tennis. You can't help thinking that there is some class bias at work here, with BBC executives allocating resources to sports that they themselves follow.
Between 1999 and 2023, the BBC broadcast a weekly, hour long highlights show of Super League matches. That was then replaced by a three year deal to broadcast fifteen matches a season live, a contract which has now expired and is apparently not going to be renewed (as with the World Cup, a highlights package will be put on the iPlayer instead). That leaves them with live coverage of the Challenge Cup and England autumn international Test matches which are played outside World Cup years. If they are cut too, you might well see a sudden drop in TV licence renewals across a swathe of Northern England.
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