Edition 2/2000

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Are The Good Times Over?
The cosy partnership between professional clubs and sporting leagues may be coming to an end.

Lately, sport seems to have had even more issues than usual - swimming's bodysuit fracas, selection disputes for the Australian team for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, rugby league stars taking international holidays in the middle of the season only to return and announce their retirement.

But resorting to litigation to resolve such issues in now an Australian growth industry.  It is yet another instance where Australia is following an American lead.

Two seasons ago, around half of America's National Basketball Association regular season draw was lost when players withdrew their labour - their goal, a bigger slice of the enormous television rights fees that had previously headed into the consolidated revenue of the NBA and its member clubs.  In a similar dispute in 1994, Major League baseball was decimated by a player lockout.

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At home, in 1996 the courts were required to intervene in the Australian Rugby League's fight against Super League.  The sport seems only now to be emerging from those dark times, where support for the sport was not merely polarised, but almost dealt a knock-out blow.

Certain time-honoured traditions in sport appear now to have lost their currency.  At the forefront is the long unchallenged right of sporting organisations to make determinations free from the spectre of litigation.

Some ill winds are blowing, threatening to end the cosy relationship between professional teams and their governing bodies or league administrators.

Bodies such as the Australian Football League have enjoyed unparalleled power to make determinations by which all 16 of its member teams have been obliged to abide.  The matters over which the AFL has long reigned supreme include the ability to sell television rights for the league as a whole.

But while the member team has, at present, few avenues on which to challenge the AFL's power, the owners and management committees which operate AFL venues have identified a potential chink in the armour.

Witness the ongoing thrust and parry between the operators of Melbourne's Optus Oval, home to the immensely well-connected Carlton Football Club, and the AFL.

Earlier this year, Carlton president John Elliott threatened to lock out pay television cameras from Optus Oval.  The Carlton board contended that C7 - ironically enough the Optus Vision support channel - would televise the game in Melbourne, live against the gate and therefore affect the club's revenue base.                                          ....Continued page 2