Peter V’landys Q&A: ‘It makes sense that we bring North Sydney Bears back in some capacity’
In a stunning expansion development, ARLC chair Peter V’landys tells Phil Rothfield why he wants to bring the North Sydney Bears back to the NRL. WATCH PVL’s exclusive interview.
Phil Rothfield
February 4, 2024 - 6:51PM
Peter V’landys has hit back at the knockers of the
NRL’s Las Vegas adventure, revealing it is part of a long-term plan for rugby league to
build a $1 billion asset base.
In a wide-ranging interview, V’landys also talks of his hopes to bring back the
North Sydney Bears as part of expansion, a funding plan for desperate country rugby league clubs and plans to cash in on the game’s next television deal.
On the Bears, he says: “It makes sense that we bring them back in some capacity – they’ve got to be in the equation.”
BUZZ: How’s Las Vegas looking? Some narks out there are half bagging it.
PVL: I appreciate the narks because it motivates you. It motivates you to prove them wrong. I can sit back and do nothing and watch the game because it’s doing exceptionally well and rest on my laurels. But I’d be negligent in my duties if I did that.
If you’re the chairman of the game, you’ve got to look at growth. You’ve got to look at how you’re going to improve the game, how are you going to get new revenues. And the one market that we’ve never really attacked is America. There’s 340 million people in the US.
We have 25 million in Australia. When we were looking at Amazon and Apple and all those big players, they kept saying to me, why would we be interested in you when there’s 40 million people in California? And I thought to myself, they’re right in a sense. We’re in a small market. Imagine if we could capture a big market, and even if we got 1 per cent of the American market, we’d have more subscribers in America than we would in Australia on broadcast.
So it’s a big challenge and you can’t do it in one go.
BUZZ: Will you lose money?
PVL: That depends on how you look at losing money. Sometimes you have a loss leader, where you invest money to get money into the future. So it will cost us money this year, but probably no more than what it used to be to launch the season.
BUZZ:I guess if we didn’t have the change you’re talking about, we’d still have 10 or 12 Sydney-based NSWRL teams. State of Origin wouldn’t have happened. We’d still be having interstate blowouts. Everyone bagged Origin back in 1980 – said it was an exhibition game.
PVL: Exactly. The first thing that I learned is to turn Twitter off. The majority of people aren’t represented on social media. I can tell you that for a fact, because everywhere I go, I get a different version. And every poll that we do provides a different version. But any game that doesn’t try to improve itself to get the new demographics will perish. There’s examples of that everywhere, where you’ve seen organisations that have just sat back, hoped for the best, and then perished.
BUZZ:I sat there with you at The Everest as Sweet Caroline was being played. I asked you then, is this your greatest achievement as an administrator? Could Las Vegas be rugby league’s Everest? I’m talking long term. I’m not talking three weekends away.
PVL: I think in six or seven years, people will sit back and say, geez, how good was that? I’m very confident of the initiative. But like anything else, if you don’t implement it right, it’s going to fail. The beauty about The Everest is that it was implemented, I think in the best possible premium manner. And we attracted a certain market. We attracted the under-30s. And it’s the same with Vegas. We’re going to get people that like sport.
You’re also going to make revenue out of sports wagering. Sports wagering in America is booming. I mean, they take $200 million in turnover on ping pong, because it’s such a big market. So they’re going to love betting on rugby league.
BUZZ:So what’s successful – 40,000 people in the stadium?
PVL: The crowd is not what’s going to be successful for me. The whole idea of it is to sell our broadcast. Now we’ve got a product called Watch NRL. And it’s a premium product made by Fox. When I was over in the US at the White House, there were some big VIPs there from Australia.
And every one of them that lived in America came and told me how good the Watch NRL app was. I don’t want to tell Matty Johns this, but they loved all the shows, especially the Matty Johns, Cooper Cronk show.
It made me think … we only have 3000 subscriptions in America. I was told no one knows about the app. So the whole idea is to promote it with this game. If we can sell a million subscriptions over five years, you’re going to be generating significant revenues and that’s the whole purpose of this, is to get the new market of people watching. Now there’s 300,000 Australians living in the US, even if you’ve got 150,000 of those, that’s $25m additional revenue each year.
BUZZ:And being live on Fox over there … this event is going to be huge for that sort of awareness?
PVL: Without that we couldn’t do it. For people that don’t know how big Fox One is, it’s the biggest sports channel in America. It’s got 220 million subscribers – and we’re going to be live in peak time with our game. And now that strategy is to try to get one game a week on Fox One. If we can do that, your subscriptions are going to come in very, very quickly.
BUZZ
eter, please don’t have one of your referee crackdowns. That grand final referee – he let the game flow – it was beautiful. It’s gotta be a great spectacle for the US fans.
PVL: No look – I think the game has really evolved well with the rule changes. In the first year, people were getting used to it. But now that everyone’s used to it and it’s sped the game up … I’m a statistics man. You know, we’ve gone to 59 minutes of play. That’s what you want – the consistent play. Rugby union, which I don’t want to kick someone while they’re down – is 33 minutes. You’re getting a lot more entertainment value out of rugby league.
