The NRL cannot continue with Todd Greenberg in charge following Channel 9 broadside
The news from Channel 9 has confirmed what many have known for a long time - Todd Greenberg simply cannot stay on as NRL CEO.
Opinion
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Only in the Bizarro World that is rugby league does it happen like this.
Chief executive Todd Greenberg was blistered by Channel 9 on Thursday for wasting NRL money through years of excessive spending.
Nine alleged this wasteful spending has cost the game “hundreds of millions of dollars” and failed to ensure clubs could adequately invest in their futures.
And it is this mismanagement that Nine will now use to leverage for a reduction in the broadcast payments — effectively costing the game more money.
Three strikes, Todd, and you’re out.
Greenberg had his reputation assassinated by an anonymous Nine spokesman on Thursday.
The shot from the shadows now echoes through the game.
Club bosses are asking how Greenberg can possibly survive.
Amid Nine’s allegations were the “mismanagement” of the code with millions of dollars “profoundly wasted” and “squandered by a bloated head office completely ignoring the needs of the clubs, players and supporters”.
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It is hard to see where Greenberg goes from here.
His next awkward phase is what he does while ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys and, most likely, NRL chief operating officer Andrew Abdo meet with Nine bosses next week to salvage the broadcast deal and, possibly, the season.
Greenberg cannot possibly think he will be part of the negotiations.
The NRL can’t afford to have him in the meeting. His reputation is now worth as much as a box of confetti.
Some believe the most productive way Greenberg can spend his week is to begin cleaning out his office.
Harsh, but having lost the confidence of his broadcast partners, he is no longer effective as the game’s boss.
Most believe Greenberg’s downfall began on Wednesday night after a conversation between Nine boss Hugh Marks and Phil Gould. A wine or two might or might not have been consumed.
For weeks, Gould has been threatening to expose the NRL’s tremendous spending. Like everyone, he knows that since the Commission era began in 2012 the game’s head office has spent like the Royals. No cost was too high.
For years, the NRL denied this excessive spending and worked hard to distract fans from the truth. The annual financial report was a masterpiece in disguise. It showed everything but nothing, all at the same time.
When Greenberg became the NRL’s head of football in 2013, spending at the NRL football department was $9.6 million, according to financial reports.
Last year it was $25 million.
It is a $16 million increase in seven years, a small insight into the extravagant spending, and it is worse than it looks. The 2013 figures included spending on the under-20s competition, which has since disappeared, as well as the referees.
The referees are now funded $10 million annually, beyond the annual salary cap of clubs.
When the heat got too much, Greenberg urged fans on Twitter to #NRLtalkthegameup. Critics of the NRL’s waste and poor management, with me and Phil Rothfield in seats 1A and 1B, were labelled “crisis merchants”.
It was an old strategy. Create a common enemy to distract the masses. At the same time appeal to the purity in the fans’ hearts.
Many fans were happy to believe because they could not possibly believe head office was so inept.
But it was a deception. A magician’s sleight of hand.
Clubs are manoeuvring against Greenberg. They question how he can remain in the top job when it is V’landys and Abdo who head to the Nine’s office to salvage the broadcast deal.
Already the big clubs are bypassing Greenberg to go direct to V’landys when they want a job done.
After an independent promoter dreamt up the Nines, for instance, the NRL realised it was a small goldmine and took over the concept once the contract ended. So the NRL Nines went ahead in Perth this season but, poorly managed and promoted, cost the game a bomb.
It revealed the hidden worry inside League Central for all these years. In too many instances the NRL has been able to absorb poor decisions because of the magnitude of the broadcast deals. Money covered money.
That is what Channel 9 called out on Thursday.
And while clearly a Nine strategy to reduce its broadcast payments, it was also a blistering swipe at the game’s boss.
It called out the poor job being done at headquarters, from the big to the small.
V’landys is already on record saying the game’s costs are “unsustainable”, a bitter truth the game now concedes.
Greenberg tried to get ahead of it.
In a conference call to the 16 clubs on March 31, he proposed a new “distribution model” for the game and stressed the need to form a working committee to begin the massive work needed. He followed up with an email dated April 1.
The new model might be the most vital piece of work in the game’s future.
He highlighted urgent areas for restructure such as the salary cap, the football cap, a restructure of the entire NRL head office, funding to the states’ leagues.
That was 11 days ago, an ideal time given most club bosses are on reduced labour and have the time to devote some thinking to what is needed.
Yet nothing has happened since.
“Todd hasn’t approached anyone to do anything about it,” one chief executive said yesterday.
“People want to help, and right now we’ve never had more time to get stuff done than at any time, but we haven’t heard anything.
“By the time we come together on Tuesday, it will have been two weeks. And by the time we need to get working on it, it will be really urgent.”
The opportunity is already missed. Clubs are now preparing to begin the season on May 28. They no longer have the same time to dedicate to solving the NRL’s problems.
And some do not want to help.
Whenever legitimate work needs to be done at head office, they feel, the NRL stops treating them like dunderheads and organises a committee of club officials to lend their expertise, they say.
It reveals two truths.
First, the NRL is incapable of getting substantial work done on its own and, for all the arrogance of head office towards clubs, are incapable of doing it without club input.
Secondly, each time the clubs help the NRL officials, they are helping keep the wrong people employed in the top jobs at headquarters.
So now some club bosses have recently questioned whether they should continue assisting the NRL.
“They haven’t got the intellectual know-how to get something done,” one club boss said yesterday.
So the growing discussion among some clubs, which could be catastrophic, is that it might be better to leave the NRL to their own decisions, at least for the short term, so they can stuff it up themselves and then be more quickly replaced.
It is a volatile time at League Central.
Greenberg has effectively been neutered as the NRL’s chief executive.
If he can’t be trusted to be part of next week’s negotiations to salvage the NRL’s season, the most important meetings since the NRL was shut down last month, how can he ever be of use again?
Certainly he has lost the faith of Nine, which pays the NRL $125 million a year.
A week ago Greenberg matched the players’ pay reductions because, he said, it was “in the best interests of the game”.
If consistency is to be applied, it is hard to see where Greenberg goes next, except to resign.
Originally published as The NRL cannot continue with Todd Greenberg in charge following Channel 9 broadside