The entrepreneurs who saved Melbourne Storm
John Stensholt
Former Rich Editor
Sep 28, 2017 – 11.00pm
The entrepreneurs who saved Melbourne Storm (afr.com)
Melbourne Storm chairman Bart Campbell calls it the "alliance of the insane".
Campbell laughs when asked why he and his fellow Storm owners would buy a rugby league club located in AFL-mad heartland. But behind the decision is the steely business resolve that has turned the club around and made it one of the most successful NRL teams on and off the field.
On Sunday evening in Sydney, the Storm will be warm favourites to beat the North Queensland Cowboys in the NRL grand final.
While
the Cowboys, playing without star halfback Johnathan Thurston and co-captain Matt Scott, provide the fairytale, the Storm finished the season as minor premiers, crushed the Brisbane Broncos 30-0 in last week's preliminary final, and their players and coaches won several individual awards this week.
Almost as impressive is how Campbell and his ownership group have the Storm in a position to break even financially next season, given they are in a league in which teams collectively lose tens of millions of dollars each year.
It will be the culmination of a five-year business plan the owners brought with them when they purchased the team from News Corporation in May 2013 for several million dollars and the promise of additional funding for a few years.
The plan was supposed to – and will – end with the Storm in its healthiest ever financial position. And hopefully also with the owners' first premiership win.
Home crowds, including two finals, have averaged about 19,800 this season, second only to the Brisbane Broncos. And Campbell says research shows when the Storm can convince a non-rugby league fan to attend a match, they are 80 per cent likely to come again.
"At the end of year five we wanted to have north of 20,000 members. Now we are 21,000 today. We wanted to continue to be a high-performing team but not spend the most. We have gone from No.1 in football department spending to 5 or 6.
"We have grown revenue across all facets of the business, from membership to sponsorship and so on. And broadly speaking we have met that [five-year] plan."
Campbell, the executive chairman of London-listed sports management group TLA Worldwide, CrownBet chief executive Matthew Tripp and
Financial Review Rich List member and Jayco founder Gerry Ryan now own the Storm after another investor, theatre entrepreneur Michael Watt, sold out earlier this year.
"Matt has the data acumen, Gerry has a good marketing brain and is very financially literate and I've got the sports marketing expertise," Campbell says. "So it has come together well.
"While we are a rugby league club, I don't think we are in a traditional sense. If you're a brand, we will be a good custodian of your brand. If you're a fan we will give you a great experience that is good value, and slowly we have made some steps. We're an entertainment brand really."
A month after the Storm had beaten the Canterbury Bulldogs to win the club's last premiership in October 2012, then London-based Campbell was in Melbourne attending that year's Melbourne Cup (coincidentally, Ryan's Americain finished second).
The night before the race, Campbell dined with long-time friend and Storm football manager Frank Ponissi. "Frank picked me up from his hotel room for dinner at Crown and parked the car at the club. Obviously I learnt later the geographical fallacy of doing that as I had to walk [2.3 kilometres] to dinner, but he showed me around ... the world-class facilities and that piqued my interest given it was known News was wanting to sell."
Campbell called News before he flew back to London, only to be told it was close to clinching a deal with another buyer: Ryan. But Ryan was also busy setting up his Orica-Scott professional cycling team. Former Australian international player and one-time Super League and later Melbourne Storm boss John Ribot was to later broker a Christmas-time dinner at trendy restaurant Coda between the duo and Tripp, who has also expressed interest in the Storm.
"I tried to convince them it was not sheer lunacy to progress with this and we formed the alliance of the insane," Campbell says. "We commenced serious due diligence in January 2013 and by May had announced the deal."
The Storm had been born during the Super League upheaval of the mid-1990s, which had split the game in two after News had established a rebel competition that was played at the same time as the then Australian Rugby League in 1997.
Melbourne entered a hastily combined competition the following year under News' ownership, and won the 1999 grand final.
But it was losing up to $10 million annually, and was later estimated to have cost News $75 million in 15 years.
All hell was to break lose in April 2010 when it was discovered the Storm had been rorting the salary cap. It was stripped of its 2007 and 2009 premierships, forced to play the 2010 season for no points, fined more than $1.7 million and several executives were sacked.
It was a huge embarrassment and the club was effectively told to stay on the straight and narrow or News would shut it down. News began looking for buyers and
while the club's finances started turning around under new CEO Ron Gauci, it was still losing more than $5 million annually by 2013 when the new owners arrived.
Ryan has been involved with the Storm the longest, firstly with his Jayco caravans business as a major sponsor and then as a non-executive director before he and the board were dumped by News in 2010 during the club's worst days.
"The people kept me [involved]," he says. "I think it is the best culture in any organisation, sporting or business, I have seen. The quality of the characters there, from the coach [Craig Bellamy] and Frank to the players. Frank and the football department don't tolerate dickheads. There's just no big heads there."
Tripp says the club, both its management and the players, have learnt plenty of lessons from losing last year's grand final to Cronulla. This year's season decider will be last for star halfback Cooper Cronk, and there will soon be the challenge of replacing ageing superstar captain Cameron Smith and fullback Billy Slater.
Until then, there's the biggest match of the season to win and while Tripp admits he will be a bundle of nerves, he says: "The feeling around the club is now more a feeling of excitement than nervousness, and people are looking forward to it."
