By Mark Baber
Janaury 3 – Pay-TV broadcaster SuperSport has signed a 1 year deal with the South African Football Association (SAFA) to broadcast all South Africa’s home and away friendly matches during 2013.
For SAFA the agreement makes a breakthrough for the national team as previous games had not always been broadcast live.
Public broadcaster SABC has been continually criticised for its failure to negotiate an agreement with rightsholder SportFive to beam matches live. The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa regulations stipulate South Africa’s matches must always be free-to-air.
The SuperSport deal includes exclusive pay transmission rights in South Africa and in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and adjacent islands, including television, internet and mobile and includes all South African matches over which SAFA has jurisdiction, including men’s and women’s national age group teams.
The deal does not cover tournament matches and qualifiers which will still have to be broadcast free-to-air and so will remain with public broadcaster SABC.
Robin Petersen, previously CEO of SAFA, who in early December took on the role of CEO of the SAFA Development Agency with the aim of getting the Bafana Bafana in the top three in Africa and top 20 in the world, said: “We have wished, for some time to have our product broadcast by SuperSport, which is a leading and world-class sports broadcaster.
The revenue derived from this deal will assist SAFA with its development plans and afford substantial further exposure for our brand on the various platforms that SuperSport broadcasts on.”
Pinky Lehoko, who is interim SAFA CEO whilst a commission of inquiry investigates match fixing allegations, said: “The additional exposure that this deal will give to our national teams will assist us commercially going forward by giving our sponsors additional exposure.”
Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana, Safa Acting President, stated. “This will assist us in mobilising the support of the nation behind Bafana Bafana as we build up to the AFCON 2013 tournament.”
The deal commences with the warm-up fixtures against Norway in Cape Town on January 8 and against Algeria
in Orlando on January 12. SuperSport has the rights to broadcast all 32 games of the African Nations Cup.
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