The Asia Pacific Rugby League receives a grant from the IRL as well as a grant from the NRL to fund its operations.
I believe it has received funding from the NZRL in the past, however I'm not fully across how that amount is calculated and believe it is dependent on the NZRL recording a profit of a certain amount.
Prior to 2019, the mid-season Tests were 100% run by the NRL, however for 2019 the APRL & IRL took over the running, with the NRL providing over a million dollar extra investment in the APRL to support Internationals that year.
The NRL also covered player insurance. Anyway, the APRL, RFL and IRL took this money, put it into a new company which would run the Oceania Cup and Lions tour and then engage Duco Events to market the matches.
Now we all saw what happened after that, Leichhardt was a horrible choice for the mid-year Test and lost money (especially after a number of IRL officials flew themselves out for the match), then of course we had the Tonga issues followed by the Lions failing to hit certain commercial KPIs, followed by a certain sponsor failing to pay their bills.
All in all, the collection of events lost money, with only Duco & a certain former IRL official walking away with anything.
Anyway for 2022, the NRL offered a similar arrangement, the APRL & IRL declined to run the event, so the NRL has taken over the mid-year Tests for next year.
In the eyes of people like Grant, the IRL & APRL are not equipped to effectively commercialise the event and even with the NRL throwing some coin towards it don't want to take on the risk as they are worried about losing money again, which considering how poor the IRL is, isn't surprising.
