Magic Weekend opportunity to enhance Super League broadcast deal – Rhodri Jones

Super League’s Magic Weekend is an opportunity for rugby league to pitch itself to potential bidders as the sport courts a future broadcast deal, Rugby Football League (RFL) managing director Rhodri Jones has said.

The league’s current broadcast deal, which sees matches televised by the BBC and Sky Sports, finishes at the end of this season.

Six of this year’s Magic Weekend fixtures will take place at Everton’s new Hill Dickinson Stadium, while Catalans Dragons’ all-French meeting with Toulouse will be played in Castres to maximise the attendance.

“The Magic Weekend is another shop window for us where we can deliver and portray the healthiness or the healthy state of the sport and the Super League in particular,” Jones, who is also interim chief executive of the RFL, told BBC Sport.

“That certainly does help us in our conversations with broadcasters, commercial partners, event delivery partners.”

Everton played host to the second Ashes Test between England and Australia last autumn, with a near-capacity crowd of 51,000 in attendance.

It was the first non-football event to be held at the ground, which opened last year, and Jones believes its success paved the way for it to be used for this year’s Magic Weekend.

“I think it was a leap of faith by Everton for that Ashes fixture but they also wanted to make a statement that they weren’t just a football club,” Jones added.

“They’ve clearly built the stadium to be able to host non-football events, whether that be other sports or music events.

“I think that Ashes fixture selling out so quickly, which then enabled us to put on the show that we were able to put on, showed them that we know how to put big events on.

“The conversation around hosting a Magic Weekend was not long in terms of negotiation. A lot of that conversation happened probably half an hour after the Ashes game concluded, so we knew that we had struck a chord with them.”