Why do some people keep pretending RL was not played in Victoria before the Storm came around?
So the game has been played in Melbourne for at least 60 to 70 years, and despite having the most dominate RL team in recent history, they only have 3,500 players.
The Pirates don't have a sugar daddy. Their bid is headed by Peter Cumins, who was part of the Western Reds team that went bust after their first season and had to be bailed out by News Ltd. Their bid has very little substance and has little public support. When the NRL 9s were in Perth the bid team said they would go to Perth Oval to survey interest. A tiny crowd turned out over the 2 days.
Only the craziest of crazies would delude themselves into thinking Ch9 would want a team in a city that won't bother watching it. Not once have the owners of that network said they want a team in Perth or Adelaide, but they did say a 2nd Brisbane team will add money to the broadcast deal. It's just as crazy to think any other network would want a team there, especially when the highest rating network is against it.
The ARLC would need an extra $23 million a year to fund the salary cap ($10 million) and annual grant ($13 million) for a Perth team. Only the craziest of crazies could be silly enough to think the broadcasters will throw that much money at a team for Perth when it will not generate that sort of revenue for them, especially now that the networks are struggling.
If a 9th game was so important then PVL would add it. He's not because the broadcasters have said they don't want a 9th game.
Broncos missed the 8 in 2010 and 2013. The last time they won the competition was 2006.
How much can you get wrong in one post lol.
Nobody was pretending that RL didn't exist in Victoria before the Storm, that is just a flagrant strawman. It was however tiny before the Storm, I doubt their participation numbers from pre-Storm days are readily available, but I
highly doubt they had over 1k participates.
The Pirates bid is
not 'headed' by Peter Cumins, it's 'headed' by John Sackson and the NRL WA.
They have at least
two beneficiaries that have put their hands up to help directly fund it, Cumins and Laurie Puddy, but their are probably other smaller stakeholders behind the scenes as well, on top of that they have/had multiple sponsors lined up.
To suggest that the bid has little substance and no public support just further demonstrates how pig-ignorant you are of the bid, and using the poorly organised disaster that was the 9s as an example while ignoring all the other good crowds and sell outs that Perth has got shows how disingenuous you are.
Furthermore trying to pretend that the Western Reds were a failure purely because of bad management on their part, and that there were no other major contributing factors in their failure is just bull shit on the face of it. By the way,
all those criticisms you made of the Reds could also be made of the Crushers, and a lot of the time they'd probably be more fitting in the Crushers case as well...
You say that no network would want a team in Perth, however News have shown interest in a Perth team in the past, and who knows what might be more appealing to Ten or Seven. We also don't know if Nine would be open to a Perth team either, because as you say, and as far as I can remember, they've never stated they want one,
but they've also never said they don'tt want one either.
But who really cares what they want specifically, because what's best for the broadcasters and what is best for the NRL are often two vastly, vastly, different things, especially in the case of Nine.
You seem to think that the ARLC covers the salary cap and gives the clubs a further $13mil grant on top, they don't, that is just f**king wrong, the cap is included in the $13mil grant. Each club gets
one grant of $13mil, and there's no reason to believe that an expansion club would get anything different as they never have in the past. In other words you're completely full of shit again.
PVL isn't infallible, just because he does or says something that doesn't make it right or a good decision. He also hasn't done anything on expansion that any other ARLC chairman and/or NRL CEO hasn't done since Gallop (with the exception of Greenberg). All of them have come in and said more or less the exact same things that he has, and then done nothing. So going on prior form of the NRL, chances are he'll probably do the same.
Finally the Broncos have missed the Finals what four or five times in their history and only won their last premiership 14 years ago. . . That's not struggling. They, their fans, and speaking broadly large parts of the RL community in Brisbane, have never struggled and don't truly know the meaning of the word.
