Derek Beaumont brutal honesty on Sky Sports

You will have seen Leigh Leopards owner Derek Beaumont’s complaints following the club’s defeat to Wigan Warriors the footage of which emerged yesterday.

One of his complaints were about Sky Sports after an interview issue with Adrian Lam.

Beaumont should be commended for his honesty a lot of the time and he spoke about Sky after the TV deal was announced.

He said on the club’s YouTube Channel: “As much as Sky are massive for the game and without them over the last 30 years where would we be? But anything that’s behind subscription based paywall that can’t be just isolated for the rugby games lessens the amount of people that can see it.

“That’s evident when you look at the viewers we get on a Sky game compared to the viewers you get on a free to air game say on Channel 4 or BBC so now we’ve got that opportunity to get the figure right.

“What’s important now as well for me is that as clubs we work together. I think we need to probably centralise the whole thing and have it as an opportunity where you can buy, say, a pass just for Leopards games, or you could buy a pass for just Leopards away games, or you could buy a pass for every game, for every club and have different ways that you can take part in this, even down to just pay per view for one game.

“There also needs to be a way that whilst that’s centralised and we can distribute it well so that everybody can benefit and up our standards, which is the whole idea of what IMG are doing is increasing standards. We also need to make sure that clubs are incentivised by the number of people they bring to the table as well. So it’s quite a lot of work for the clubs to do together through RL Commercial, but I think working together is key.”