Sky’s partnership with TAB has brought betting promotions more directly into rugby broadcasts.
Sky has changed the nature of some of its TAB integration after a recent complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority.
The TAB segment has been hosted by former All Black Israel Dagg.
Sky put out viewing figures throughout the year that showed the country had been gripped by Super Rugby in 2025, but there was no mention of how many people loved that their live broadcasts were punctuated by the TAB making a hard sell to start gambling.
It’s unlikelythat Sky bothered to find out because the hard sell has continued into its test coverage, with the same stable of former players being wheeled out to excitedly jabber about the odds on this and that.
Over the years, on and off, Sky has dabbled in this sort of pseudo-sponsorship arrangement with the TAB.
But in 2025, Sky has amped its TAB exposure, presumably because the latter’s owner Entain has amped the price it pays, and lined up various former players, some of whom are well known, to stare down the barrel of the camera and excitedly promote what are presumably enticing ways in which viewers can part with their cash.
This, to me, all feels a little too intensive and intrusive. It’s a blurred-line association where it feels like the TAB is a blood relative in the rugby family – maybe not a sibling to Sky and New Zealand Rugby, but certainly a first cousin.
The visual continuity between the pre-game analysis and the betting odds being presented, and the chummy names that are bandied between one another, gives the TAB a legitimacy it must be wildly delighted to have bought.
Sky has adjusted how it integrates sports-betting segments into its live rugby coverage. Photo / Photosport
In response to a recent complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, Sky has changed the way it integrates some of the sports-betting segment into its live rugby coverage. A viewer had complained the nature and tone of the segments meant audiences might not distinguish them as advertising.
Entain and Sky TV defended the live segments and denied they breached broadcast codes. After receiving the complaint, Sky says it had reviewed its protocols “around the delineation of this content”.
Nonetheless, gambling is being sold not so much as a viewer-enhancement option, but a viewer necessity. This is an incredible win for the TAB, but a potential disaster for rugby as the messaging is coming across that the games themselves can’t hold up as entertainment in their own right.
It’s also not enhancing Sky’s position as the self-styled home of sport. By and large, Sky does a good job packaging live rugby, but there are too many former rugby players offering too many cliches in lieu of hard analysis, and Joey Wheeler probably enjoys delivering his particular brand of comedy more than anyone does watching it.
But the commentating is on point, the camera work is exemplary, the production is slick and Justin Marshall is easily one of the world’s best sidekicks, chipping in with astute observations.
The TAB segment feels horribly off-brand: a serious clash of styles that jars as much as it would to see an Andy Warhol at the Louvre or a ten-pin bowling alley at Buckingham Palace.
It’s somewhat gauche, tacky, icky even, because as much as the gambling industry wants to restyle itself as a socially responsible and universally accepted recreational pursuit, it will likely never lose the sense that it carries a dark side.
“Entain takes seriously its responsibility to promote wagering in a safe and transparent way,” the company told the Herald in a statement.
“Our integrations have been part of live sport in New Zealand for more than a decade. They are designed to provide relevant information for those who choose to bet and always include safer gambling messages.
“We continue to work with Sky to ensure clear separation between editorial and commercial content, and to maintain the safer option for New Zealanders, as opposed to the offshore illegal black market where no consumer protections exist.”
Sky is the self-styled home of sport in New Zealand. Photo / SmartFrame
Fair play to Entain, it knows the best way to lose an unwanted history is to make a new one and hook a young generation into digital gambling where, at the push of a button, they can have a second-screen experience that may land them $50 while they watch the rugby.
But the gambling world is not all Gen-Zers bantering away on WhatsApp groups about their $10 multi.
There’s a less glamorous side where desperate people pore over the race meet fields and spend their last $10, knowing that if their horse doesn’t come in, they will be going home to an empty house, having to explain once again to loved ones why they need to borrow more money to pay the rent.
Sky is treading a fine moral line with its TAB partnership, and itself taking a gamble of sorts that the political winds are blowing in such a way as to make it more likely no one will notice or care, and anyone who does, will be outed as pushing wokeism gone mad, or advocating for the nanny state half the country feels it rid itself of at the last election.
Gregor Paul says Sky is treading a fine moral line with its TAB partnership. Photo / Photosport
Sky, in a statement, said: “Like many media organisations in New Zealand, we have a commercial arrangement with Entain, the operator of New Zealand’s official sports betting agency TAB, which includes betting odds incorporated into select sporting events on our platforms.
“All integrations are clearly branded as segments produced by the New Zealand TAB and are accompanied by safer betting precautions and R18 messaging.”
It’s a commercial world, gambling is legal and so maybe my position is indeed wokeism gone mad. But Sky is a subscription business and there used to be an unwritten rule – a gentleman’s agreement almost – that in return for viewers paying hefty monthly fees, they wouldn’t have to be bombarded with advertising, or certainly not have the very players they once paid handsomely to watch, co-opted into being salesmen for the gambling industry.
The combination now of a subscription that comes with the TAB as part of the package, feels like a win-win for Sky and Entain – with the former benefiting from two bites of the revenue cherry and the latter normalising itself as part of the rugby entertainment package.
Disclaimer: The Herald has a commercial relationship with Entain under which sports betting odds are made available online to readers.
