Peter Williams: League in trouble over TV, pay cap

This is not a good time for the ANZ Netball Championship. But I doubt those running the sport's top league actually realise the problems they've created on this side of the Tasman.

The move to pay TV has, as predicted, resulted in the number of people watching netball plummet. Once again it shows that unless it's the All Blacks, Super 14 or a winning Warriors team, live sport on Sky just doesn't get the numbers.

The prime-time match on Sunday between the Steel and the Tactix pulled fewer than 40,000 viewers, or only 2 per cent of viewers. The Magic's big win over the Swifts on Monday attracted around 70,000 but that was just a 3 per cent audience share.

It's no surprise the most-watched game is the delayed package on TV One on Saturday afternoon. Too often it features the hopeless Pulse but last week there were more than 100,000 viewers and it took a whopping 13 per cent of the total TV audience.

Netball, like basketball, football and cricket before it, has sold out to pay TV but at a considerable cost to the accessibility of the sport. At least Netball New Zealand had the good sense to keep their test matches on free-to-air TV. Sell those games to pay TV and watch football's reach among teenage female athletes become even more effective.

Beyond the TV issues, the ANZ Championship format is so flawed it makes plans for the expanded Super Rugby competition look like strategic genius.

There is neither a full home-and-away regular season nor a single round of matches. Instead it's a crazy hybrid of home-and-away matches against teams in your country and one-off matches against those from the other. So the Magic and the Swifts, last season's finalists, likely to be prime contenders again and surely the biggest box office and TV match-up in the league, won't meet again until the playoffs.

Then there's the salary cap fiasco. Each team is allowed $300,000, with a minimum of $12,000 per player. Except there's no limit on third party payments and fringe benefits.

So an area like Waikato-Bay of Plenty, which is both affluent and parochial, can fund a squad full of Silver Ferns, while Wellington, which is affluent but not especially parochial, is saddled with a bunch of leftovers.

As the NRL and the NFL prove season after season, a disciplined and enforced salary cap makes for an exciting and unpredictable league week to week, and where the spoils of championship victory over the years are spread around. Under the current system, no other New Zealand team has a chance of breaking the Magic's dominance because that franchise has been allowed to nab all the best players.

The ANZ Championship is currently a mish-mash of a semi-professional league. Here are three suggestions to get it right:

Insist on a proper salary cap without extra benefits, then the best players will have to be spread around. Heck, some might even go to Wellington.

Play either one full round or a complete home-and-away regular season schedule to make the draw fair on all teams.

Put the best game of the week on free to air TV instead of the worst.

At the moment this league is too predictable to be of much interest outside core netball fans.

It doesn't have enough money to be fully professional like the ANBL or the A League but, until it does more with its resources, its prospects are limited.

Peter Williams in a presenter for TVNZ.