Michael Miller, chief executive of News Corp Australia, told a sporting leadership conference that athletes who reject sponsorships from mining or energy companies hurt grassroots sports.
Miller said that while the athletes themselves do not lose any pay when team or organisation sponsorships with mining or energy companies are cancelled, the people playing at grassroots level do.
“Stars are your biggest strength and your biggest liability,” Miller told the SportNXT Shaping the Future of Sport conference in Melbourne.
“When sporting stars become activists, it has a negative impact on the growth of the game, in terms of athletes choosing who their sponsors are and who they will and won’t work with.
“You employ people, you come to work accepting that the team, the company you work for, make decisions on your behalf, and for athletes to take a fairly firm decision they don’t want to take a sponsorship from a mining company, from an energy company … their pay isn’t going to suffer, but ultimately it’s the grassroots and pathway programs that will.”
ABC journalist and panel moderator Tracey Holmes questioned Miller’s remarks, at which point he doubled down.
“I find that athletes feel they have permission to make those statements, but other organisations wouldn’t accept it,” he said.
“If you don’t want to work for that organisation, you leave and work elsewhere.”
There have been a number of high-profile battles over sponsorship money for sporting teams in the last year — most notably Donell Wallam and Netball Australia’s battle with mining magnate Gina Rinehart.
Noongar woman Wallam had objected to Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting company sponsoring the Australian netball team. Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, publicly advocated for a policy of sterilisation to fix what he called “the Aboriginal problem.” Reinhart has never publicly commented on her father’s views.
Hancock Prospecting later pulled its funding for the Diamonds before Visit Victoria jumped in to save the sport with an equally valuable $15 million deal.
President of Melbourne Football Club, Kate Roffey, disagreed with Miller.
“It’s only courtesy, it’s not my responsibility to ask them what’s important to them as athletes,” Roffey said.
Miller was also critical of sporting codes that scheduled multiple matches at the same time, making media coverage more challenging. He also noted that on Foxtel’s Kayo streaming service, more men were watching women’s sports than women themselves and that it was a challenge to get women to watch women’s sports.
