Fox Sports completely ignore A-League first round after losing broadcast rights – Sporting News AU
Fox Sports and News Corp has chosen to completely ignore the A-League Men’s competition on some of their platforms in the first season they don’t have broadcast rights for the league.
With Channel 10 and Paramount+ winning the A-League Men’s competition for the next five seasons, Fox Sports – who broadcast the first 16 years of the Australian domestic league – has decided to not cover the first round on their website or main football Twitter account.
A quick glance across Fox Sports’ football vertical shows zero coverage of the A-League Men since three articles were written about the high-profile story of Adelaide United’s Josh Cavallo, who attracted worldwide headlines after being one of the first footballers to come out as gay.
It’s the same story with Fox Football’s Twitter account, which is still active and ironically says in its biography that it’s ‘Your Home of Australian Football’.
However, despite posting plenty of tweets related to the Socceroos and Manchester United’s sacking of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Fox Football did not post one bit of content about the A-League Men.
News Corp’s major city websites, including the Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, chose not to run any editorial online about the A-League Men opening round, but they did feature a snippet of video from Fox Sports’ news channel which included a short video on each of the six matches.
It’s a clear scaling back of Fox Sports and News Corp’s coverage, with most Australian sporting websites running editorial during the A-League Men first round and its lead-up.
However, it wasn’t plain sailing for the A-League’s newest broadcaster Paramount+, with the ViacomCBS-owned organisation force to issue an apology after technical difficulties severely hampered their coverage of a match on Saturday night during the A-League Men first round.
In just their second day of covering the competition, the new streaming service was grilled by fans trying to watch a game involving Western United and Melbourne Victory.
Some viewers were unable to view the start of the match on the platform, while others were unhappy with the general picture quality on display throughout the 90 minutes.
Central Coast, Melbourne City and Melbourne Victory were victors in the first round of the new A-League season, with three of the six matches finishing in draws.