With Foxtel folding into the investment fund of a Ukraine-sanctioned billionaire, Australia has suddenly been dropped into the churn of sportswashing — that overlapping network of bloated private equity funds and authoritarian nation states that is remaking the global sporting market.
Sports streamers boosting the price of sporting rights — and thus flushing cash into leagues dominated by largely privately owned football clubs — is key to bigging up a corporatised sport that London-based journalist Miguel Delaney wrote about in his Christmas best-seller States of Play: How Sportswashing Took Over Football.
Now the Murdochs are sticking their toes into the soapy water, exchanging News Corp’s controlling share of Foxtel (and its related streaming services Kayo and Binge) into a 6% share-holding of one of the largest of the global sports streamers, DAZN (minority Foxtel owner, Telstra, will get 3%).
The deal announced just days before it was lost in Australia’s Christmas torpor is subject to “regulatory approval” including the Foreign Investment Review Board recommendation to the treasurer.
The foreign investment policy guidelines were revamped by Treasurer Chalmers last May with a stronger national security focus, to a “risk-based, case-by-case basis, to ensure they are not contrary to the national interest”. Chalmers has previously handballed News Corp matters to Assistant Minister Stephen Jones, due to a conflict of interest (Chalmers’ wife works for the US company).
“Da-Zone” (as it is apparently pronounced) is largely owned by the private equity side of the sportswashing network through Access Industries Ltd, an investment company owned by Ukraine-but-not-UK-sanctioned (and Odesa-born) billionaire Leonard (sorry, Sir Len) Blavatnik.
According to the latest Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Blavatnik sits at 40 on the list of the 500 richest people in the world. (That puts Rupert Murdoch on scale: he’s struggling down at 207.)
Blavatnik initially made his money out of the 1990s privatisation of the Russian aluminium industry. Tortoise Media says: “Blavatnik was part of Alfa-Access-Renova, a consortium whose members included the now-sanctioned billionaires Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg and German Khan.” In 2013, TNK-BP was sold to the Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft for US$56 billion, netting Blavatnik US$7billion.
He was sanctioned by Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a year ago with unspecified “special economic and other restrictive measures”, although he remains a respected philanthropist (and political donor to the Conservative Party) in the UK.
Call him rich, but don’t call him an “oligarch”. One Guardian report on protests following his £75 million donation to Oxford University to found the Blavatnik School of Government was footnoted: “Lawyers for Mr Blavatnik contacted us after publication, in May 2016, stating that Mr Blavatnik is not an associate of Vladimir Putin, with whom he has had no personal contact since 2000.”
His “representatives” contacted The Guardian again after it reported last July that his majority-owned Israel Channel 13 had cancelled its flagship news program which had been critical of Netanyahu and the war in Gaza — “purely a political decision, contravening all financial and journalistic logic,” according to Haaretz.
That story was also footnoted: “After publication of this article, we were contacted by a representative for Sir Len Blavatnik restating his view that ‘oligarch’ is an incorrect description of him. The representative said Blavatnik, who is a UK/US citizen born in Ukraine during the Soviet era, has ‘divested of all his major Russian assets years ago’. Blavatnik has also stated previously that his ‘personal and commercial activities are not, and have never been, involved with Putin, Russian politics or the Russian government'”.
The DAZN growth plan is the global sportswashing strategy in miniature: grow corporate value by pumping up turnover, washing private equity money through sport as evidence of growing value. The proposed News Corp/Telstra shareholding is valued at an eye-watering US$2.1 billion, based on the traditional private equity measure of seven times Foxtel’s 2024 operating profit or EBITDA. By comparison Nine is valued by the stock market at about US$1.3 billion on a similar 2024 EBITDA.
The deal values DAZN at about US$23.3 billion. But the company has lost billions over the years (in pounds, dollars or Euros, take your pick) in chasing sporting rights. In the lead-up to the Foxtel announcement, it was announced that it was committing a further US$1billion to buy the rights to the football Club World Cup to be played in the US this coming northern summer.
Zooming in, it’s easy to see what’s in the deal for News Corp: it finally gets the struggling Foxtel off its books, with the inter-company loan of about A$578 million repaid to boot. Looking closer reveals one of the industry’s worst kept secrets: that the real power in the company’s Australian operations is Lachlan’s consigliere, Foxtel chair Siobhan McKenna, who apparently negotiated the deal.
But what’s in it for DAZN? Zoom out to see the sportswashing — the “influence through infrastructure”, per Delaney — of the gulf states and their sovereign wealth funds, of the Russian billionaire diaspora, and of cashed-up private equity.
It’s globalising the big four sports — golf, tennis, cricket, and, the great white whale, football. It’s using the big tech growth model: drown your losses in the flood of private equity until sheer size washes you to unassailable monopoly.
The DAZN payment for the Club World Cup is a key component of the sportswashing network plan to break football into the US market, building off the post-COVID expansion of Major League Soccer to 30 teams and reporting that football had overtaken ice hockey to be the fourth most watched sport in the country. The US is also cohosting the 2026 World Cup with Trump’s 51st state, Canada, and his bête noire, Mexico.
Football is already winning the sports streaming wars in Australia, with Optus Sport’s English Premier League claiming over one million subscribers for its annual cost of about $100 million, while Kayo pays far more to aggregate the smaller audiences of AFL, NRL and cricket into 1.55 million paying subscribers (plus the 1.2 million households that still have Foxtel).
The losers in this sportswashing world are those provincial sports that are just too small to build global scale, like our own NRL and AFL. How does that fit into the national interest?
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