Rupert Murdoch Changed Sports Media Forever With the Flick of a Pen

Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he’d be stepping down from his twin roles as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. unleashed a flurry of premature obituaries for the 92-year-old media mogul, who has neither died nor ceded his power. “In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas,” Murdoch wrote Thursday in a memo to staffers, and if you can’t spot the ambiguity, it’s because it isn’t there.

If Murdoch isn’t going anywhere—his assertion that employees “can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon” is not the sort of thing you’re likely to hear from a man who’s ambling off into the sunset—his symbolic exit is an occasion for a look back at his sports-media legacy and a glance forward at what comes after he actually does hang it up. Fox Sports’ legacy was cemented the day Murdoch bulldozed his way into the hierarchy of NFL gatekeepers, but things may become a bit more complicated when the IRL version of Succession begins unspooling.

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Thirty years ago, Murdoch stunned the sports world when he out-bid a tightfisted Laurence Tisch for the NFL’s ultra-premium NFC package, which CBS had controlled for the previous 38 years. While one CBS exec at the time mocked Murdoch’s upstart Fox network for its “drunken sailor” binge-and-splurge, NFL commish Paul Tagliabue was more than happy to relieve the Aussie newspaper baron of his $1.58 billion.

Still reeling from the ravages of the 1990-91 recession, Tisch grumbled that the business of televised football was losing more money than it was bringing in, and initially went into the renewal talks with a lowball offer: $250 million per season, or some $15 million less than CBS’ annual rate under its legacy NFL contract. Then-CBS Sports boss Neal Pilson managed to convince Tisch to up the bid to $295 million per year, still $100 million shy of Murdoch’s offer.

The fat check wasn’t the only factor in convincing Tagliabue to deal his deluxe TV package to Fox, a UHF channel that beamed discontented shoe salesman Al Bundy into 10.6 million homes every Sunday night. What often gets forgotten in the telling of the Fox Sports origin story is David Hill’s bravura presentation to the NFL TV committee on Dec. 7, 1993. The president of Murdoch’s Sky Sports channel, Hill won over committee member Jerry Jones with his pitch, which placed the NFC at the very center of the Fox broadcasting firmament.

Fox submitted its winning bid shortly after that meeting in Dallas. A flabbergasted CBS tried to pivot to the less-appealing AFC package, only to see it go to Dick Ebersol’s gang at NBC…which, for what it’s worth, had underbid the Tiffany Network by some $30 million.

To this day, you’ll hear people say that Murdoch was crazy to have spent so much money on the NFL, and while there was certainly a measure of profligacy in the air, that single deal marked the beginning of the Fox Sports juggernaut. Besides, given the state of the current NFL media rates, that winning bid now seems fairly austere. When adjusted for inflation, Fox’s annual rate for its 1994-98 deal works out to a steal at $839.3 million.

Having tapped CBS legends Pat Summerall and John Madden to man the A booth while bringing on the likes of James Brown, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Jimmy Johnson to man its overstuffed NFL pregame show, Fox had all the pieces in place to play in the big leagues. A Major League Baseball deal followed in 1996, and Fox’s first-ever World Series (Braves-Yankees) closed out in front of a TV audience of 30.4 million viewers. In no time at all, Fox had transformed from the weird little weblet that pumped Bart Simpson and Brenda Walsh into our homes into a full-on sports destination.

The hits just kept on coming—long after Hill wowed Jones, and Murdoch showed Tagliabue his bank balance—but it’s hard to say what Fox Sports might look like after the big boss hangs up his cleats. While Murdoch’s son, Lachlan, is the public face of Fox Corp., the old man still controls 40% of the company’s voting stock. Lachlan is the titular chairman and CEO of Fox Corp, and is obviously well positioned to lead the company going forward; trouble is, the elder Murdoch’s preferences won’t necessarily hold up once he’s gone gone. The media mogul’s trust is presided over by four of his adult children, and together they’ll inherit the business, with each holding the same amount of voting power as his or her siblings.

You’ve seen the HBO show, so you know what happens when a media empire goes up for grabs. Fox Sports will be in good hands so long as CEO Eric Shanks and his crew are still running things, but the definitive end of the Rupert Murdoch era is likely to give rise to momentous changes in Fox’s ownership. If an Amazon or an Apple elects to stage a hostile takeover bid while the offspring are preoccupied by an internecine blood feud, Fox Sports could be in for a season of turmoil.

After the Murdoch kids have dispensed with their King Lear bit, the pirates of Silicon Valley would be wise to approach their new toy with an air of mindful abstention. Of course, if you have $20 billion to burn, you’ll probably wind up monkeying with the source code. But before anyone starts dreaming up new chyrons and tries to turn Cleatus the Robot into a Skynet-grade delivery drone, bear in mind that Rupert Murdoch has matrilineal longevity working in his corner. At her death, his mother was 103 years old.

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