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There is still much to be done before the NRL can possibly return
As rugby league attempts to rise from the ashes of the disastrous Todd Greenberg administration, the game must conquer numerous financial catastrophes if it is to return on May 28th, writes PAUL KENT
As rugby league attempts to rise from the ashes of the disastrous Todd Greenberg administration, the game must conquer numerous financial catastrophes if it is to return on May 28th, writes PAUL KENT.
The mood inside League Central on Tuesday, a day after the boss failed to return, was about as solemn as a Supreme Court photograph.
NRL head of football Graham Annesley had his weekly meeting with his football staff over Zoom and the questions were a little more urgent but he had few answers for them.
They wanted to know when they were needed back at work and how many games the new competition would have, when was Origin going to be played, and Annesley’s answer was the same as it was around the rest of the game.
Nobody knows anything until ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys and the broadcasters, Channel 9 and Fox Sports, have reached some sort of resolution about what the revised broadcast deal looks like.
Clubs are asking the same questions as Annesley’s staff.
Several Sydney clubs began talking to staff on Tuesday about possible resumption dates but each was the same. The conversations were light on detail.
Just who and how many are required, and when they will be needed, can’t be decided until someone has some kind of idea what the resumed competition looks like.
It is for these reasons the new broadcast negotiations will be done in record time.
There is now just 36 days until the competition is scheduled to return.
V’landys met with Foxtel chief executive Patrick Delany and will meet with Channel 9 boss Hugh Marks as early as Wednesday.
Once he has the positions of each broadcaster they will come together in the hope of finding common ground.
It is hoped there will be a resolution as early as Friday.
If so, it will be some kind of small miracle. Tens of millions of dollars are at stake and rarely are decisions made so quickly.
Already the talk is of a significant cut to this year’s broadcast deal. The NRL will counter with an offer of more money and, as a trade, the potential to extend the current contract, potentially with some of the money from the final year to be paid upfront now.
Marks has already spoken of as much and it is a position the NRL is comfortable making.
The revised broadcast deal will be the first financial reset the game will undertake.
The clubs are pushing for more financial transparency, which V’landys has promised.
The salary cap will be taken to with some kind of heavy machinery and football departments will be slashed considerably.
The hope is that by the end of it the NRL and clubs and players settle on a fair position, and a sustainable one.
It might be a great move forward for the game.
The NRL has carried the perception since the Commission era began that clubs could not be trusted with their own money and so should be kept safe from themselves.
Only the NRL began carrying on with the same financial deception it labelled the clubs with.
It began unravelling this year when the COVID-19 crisis hit and the NRL announced it had $104 million in the bank. Clubs were told another $25 million in receivables brought the amount to $129 million. The clubs felt nervous but confident.
I am sure that, at this time, the NRL had no idea the severity of what was about to hit so felt comfortable speaking with a little bravado.
But then the true figures came out.
The $129 million included a $49 million deferred liability payment to be paid back by 2022. The $25 million in receivables was realistically only $15 million.
So the $129 million was really $70 million.
Then it got worse.
The players asked for access to their hardship fund, given it was a full-blown crisis.
The NRL had to reveal it had not actually been banking their money. The agreement, they limply pointed out, was that the money had to be in their account at the end of the broadcast cycle.
Elsewhere, the clubs, because the NRL believed they could not be trusted, were ordered to pay money each season into a distressed clubs fund.
Again, with the clubs in some distress, the NRL did not have it either.
Everyone knows the NRL pays the clubs $13 million a season, which should be more than enough with a salary cap under $10 million.
But the club grant is back-ended in much the same way the NRL has been critical of clubs back-ending player contracts.
Funding in 2018 was $12.567 million, growing incrementally each year until the 2022 grant of $13.633 million.
But even from that the NRL claws back a significant amount in forced payments on the clubs that undermined the relationship.
Each year each club is asked to pay $110,000 for statistics, $178,000 for the NRL’s digital department, $150,000 for career-ending hardship fund, $188,000 for distressed club reserves and $60,000 cash after the NRL put a clause in for clubs to save money each year.
The NRL also stopped funding clubs from taking games to regional areas, making clubs not only have to pay for taking games away but obligating them to pay for the referees’ equipment, too.
They also reduced each club’s merchandise royalties from 40 per cent to 20 per cent, which worked out to be about an extra $60,000 in cash stripped from each club.
That is nearly three-quarters of a million dollars clubs never get to see for services, some of which they don’t even want.
But the NRL is in the insult business.
So when the clubs and NRL negotiated a $1.21 million rescue package last month, to get them through May, April and June, the NRL held back $23,000 from each club, banking only $1.187 million into each club’s bank accounts on April 1.
V’landys needed to intervene to force the NRL to pay its own clubs the amount they had agreed to pay.
So he comes together this week, with Delany and Marks, hoping to get done in a week what it usually takes many more months to get done.
The entire game is hoping they get it done.
