The depressing thing is that there is a nugget of truth in Harper's comments. Sky does need to step up and support us better.
Sadly, sky probably feel they've paid 200k too much for Aleague rights. It's up to the NZ public to decide if they want this team in the Aleague - if they do, then they need to watch nix games as well as the other teams game, go to the matches, buy merchandise, season memberships, get involved in radio talkback etc. If the demand is up, then they'll have to pay more. The problem is there is still a very large portion of the population that couldn't give a crap about football in this country and would quite happily see it die.
I try to book reminders in on mysky so that when there is football on, the channel will change to it and sky will know it's being watched.
Sky have zero incentive to pay more because its unlikely they are going to lose many viewers if they decide against renewing the HAL rights. How has losing EPL, Golf and F1 hurt them? Nada.... They value rugby, league and cricket in that order as the revenue generators and the rest are all the 1%ers. For them, a bidding war is easy to walk away from because commercially, not having HAL rights does not hurts them.