If one hangs out with football stars, there’s a strong incentive to keep a mobile phone handy, after phone footage of Roosters captain Mitchell Pearce pretending to fuck a dog sold for $60,000 yesterday.

The video, taken on a mobile phone on Australia Day in Sydney, features an apparently drunk Pearce trying to kiss a woman, who rejects him saying she is a lesbian. The football star then picks up her small dog and pretends to thrust into it, before the woman takes it off him. Pearce then urinates on some furniture. He was this morning stood down.

Crikey understands The Daily Telegraph and Channel Nine split the cost of the video, with News Corp paying $40,000 while Nine paid $20,000. (It’s a fairly good price for that kind of footage. Back in 2014, it was widely reported that News Corp paid $210,000 for explosive images of the James Packer and David Gyngell punch-up.)

The video was set to air on both outlets after 7pm. Presuming Diimex — a media content exchange — had the standard agreement applied to the deal, it took 25% of the amount paid by the media companies ($15,000), and whoever produced the video pocketed the remaining $45,000. For Nine and News, however, it was only a partial triumph. Shortly before either one could tell their viewers a thing about the scoop, Channel Seven had the story.

Diimex, the same agency that sold the Packer/Gyngell photos, had been shopping the video around that afternoon, and it had been seen by many people within both News Corp and Nine. The agency hadn’t offered the footage to Seven (which doesn’t have the NRL broadcast rights anyway), but reporter Josh Massoud got wind of it. Enough people had seen the video which meant that with a bit of calling around, Channel Seven had the story, leading its news bulletin with the lewd affair. While Seven News didn’t have the footage, it was able to describe what was in it and who it involved, spoiling the story for its rivals.

Minutes later, the Tele posted an online story on the development, telling its readers it would release the footage at 7.30pm. Nine’s A Current Affair, meanwhile, aired the footage at 7pm.

Regardless, A Current Affair still managed the biggest audience, despite getting the story second. Sydney’s Seven News had 234,000 viewers, to A Current Affair‘s 323,000 Sydney viewers.

Still images from the video grace the front page of the Daily Tele this morning. The paper took the time to place a black bar over the face of the dog, presumably to spare the dog’s reputation. The Courier-Mail showed less concern for the canine …

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It’s is not the first time NRL players have been implicated, through mobile phone footage, in what many would describe as rude or lewd activities — from former Cronulla player Todd Carney urinating in his own mouth, to two Canberra players relaxing on a roof, drinking alcohol in defiance of club rules. In 2007, mobile phone footage emerged of an eastern suburbs player having sex in a toilet stall in a hotel in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Last year, NRL, Rugby Union and AFL players were shown in videos taking drugs on the Gold Coast in late 2014. And Andrew Johns, one of the NRL’s best ever players and a so-called “immortal”, was dropped by Nine from its 2015 Grand Final broadcast after being filmed on a mobile phone allegedly drunk and unconscious at Toowoomba airport in regional Queensland.

Earlier this month Woman’s Day published images of AFL players Dane Swan and Travis Cloke nude (the images had been sent by both players to women they’d presumably been trying to sleep with). It’s not clear how much the mag paid for the pictures, though one guesses it would have been far less than the Pearce video, given, as Crikey reported last week, multiple outlets had rejected the images beforehand.