I just posted this elsewhere but thought that it is probably more appropriate here.
How to expand our game into nontraditional areas with much less risk to the game.
Firstly the problem when you have owners that are rich, but not uber rich like the Penn family, they are very mindful of every dollar spent and sensitive to losses especially when they are counted in the millions of dollars. If clubs are to be owned privately, then I feel that it should be by entities that are worth in the vicinity of $500-600m+, but preferably billionaires. That way they would be less likely to be spinning out on the losses and easily able to afford them.
That idiot that owned the Knights for a while doesn't count. He was basically a billionaire on paper and a lot of smoke and mirrors stuff and we all know what happened there.
In fact I would love to see the ARLC take the initiative and scour Australia and the world to find a billionaire or two that would fancy owning an NRL franchise. I would then offer them a one city, one club franchise licence either Adelaide or even Tasmania or Darwin. I wouldn't offer Perth or Christchurch because I feel that those locations don't need much encouragement to sell them at all. But by offering a licence to a billionaire that otherwise would not see a team there for probably decades, we maybe able to fast track our expansion march way sooner then otherwise possible with very little risk to the game and its resources.
So my point is that by offering these less desirable locations to a mega rich person and making it clear that he is not only wanted for his good looks and charming personality, but primarily for his abundant wealth, then the owner knows exactly why he has the licence and there are no delusions as to what the ARLC wants from him and why. The advantage of having a billionaire that is ok with spending his cash this way is whatever the new franchise needs the new franchise gets. Something that most of our current clubs can't do easily. Of course from the ARLC's perspective, I would give these new franchises allowances and advantages that other more established regions would/will not receive. One example would be, for the first 25 years of the licence, they can bring in any player from anywhere in the world that hasn't played in the NRL for 3 years or more, league or Union or any other sport, and the max it will count on their salary cap is $300K if they are current internationals in their current sport, minimum wage if they are not. Imagine some of the Rugby players that we could get for example Semi Radradra could come back to Oz. Maybe even reverse the compliment and poach a AFL star player or two. That would generate a massive amount of publicity for the new franchise and our game like it did for them.
But crucially part of the written conditions of the licence would be that they must spend minimum $5m per annum on junior development that isn't associated directly to their own lower grades, and a further $2m on lower tier clubs that are associated directly to the NRL club. So in other words if it were an Adelaide licence the kiddies clubs and competitions would be getting $5m right across all the junior clubs from 5 year olds right up to u15's. Then a further $2m for the ones above that i.e. HM, S.G Ball and upwards. By doing this the long term benefits are obvious.
Also by having someone like this involved they would also have some clout on politicians in those States/cities and if for example the ARLC were to do this soon enough for an Adelaide franchise then maybe the billionaire owner could persuade the S.A. pollies to reverse their decision to not build the Adelaide city indoor stadium for rectangular football use and build it so it is footy compliant. Something that our ARLC Chairman should be screaming about but has said absolutely nothing and it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't even know about it at all.
Anyway, sure all pie in the sky stuff, but this is how you can really add some new blood and excitement to the comp with much less risk and a hell of a lot of upside if you can pull it off. Sure it would be very hard to find the billionaire Unicorn/s that I am referring to here, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. But if done correctly and well negotiated, I wouldn't be all that surprised if there were at least one or two billionaires out of the 2755 odd that exist worldwide today that wouldn't mind to take a shot at owning a top tier football franchise in a country like Australia, that normally would be way more expensive then a few million dollars a year to do. Spending $10-20m of their own money a year would seem like chicken feed to a lot of these guys and the exposure and awareness of his business and other interests would go through the roof down here in Australia. Much more then probably otherwise and may even be a relatively cheap way of advertising his name or other business interests. Who knows?
Also remember that they would still receive the $13m a year grant money that all the clubs receive, but the TV deals would obviously reflect the new teams and increased games in new time zones too. Win, win for all concerned. For all the glass half full Nellie's out there, yes the the TV money will be increased no matter what anyone says. You just have to look at the AFL with the money that they are given every time they add a team anywhere. To suggest otherwise is to believe lying TV execs who always want to keep prices down and weak ARLC execs. The AFL just does whatever it wants and the TV contracts just follow. There will always be a network willing to fork out big to own the rights to all or part of the rights of one of the two biggest footy code in the country. Of that you can be sure of or at least as long as footy rates on TV.
