NRL shutdown: How the NRL squandered millions, Paul Kent
Footy is life for Reggie The Rabbit, a symbol for how much the game means to fans. He’s never been paid a dollar and like so many in the game he wants to know how the NRL wasted over $1.8 billion.
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Nobody from his club, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, told Charlie Gallico he was not working last weekend but, after a phone call earlier in the week and with all that was going around, well, Charlie didn’t need to be told.
“Charlie?” said Shannon Donato, the Rabbitohs chief commercial officer, in that phone call. “We need you here at Redfern.”
They took a photo of Charlie locked outside the gates at Redfern Oval, only nobody knew it was Charlie, and the next morning in the Daily Telegraph he read about the NRL preparing to play its first ever round without fans and Charlie knew what that meant.
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And there in the picture was Reggie the Rabbit, locked out of Redfern, with Charlie hiding anonymously inside the suit like he has done since 2002 when South Sydney got back in the NRL and Charlie asked if he could wear the Reggie suit.
And for a while last weekend was as bad as Charlie thought it would ever get, watching his Rabbitohs on TV, until he sat on his lounge Monday and from seemingly out of nowhere the ticker tape on his TV bled red and Fox Sports News announced a big press conference coming up and then next minute he was listening to Todd Greenberg saying the competition was suspended.
Charlie did not know what to think at that.
Footy was his life. Everything in his life that mattered was connected to football.
And now it was a life being threatened because the game failed to insulate its future.
For almost nine years, since the independent Commission took over running the game, the NRL has squandered millions of dollars with barely a button to show for it.
Earlier this week the NRL opened the books to the clubs, a chance to explain how they will fund their way out of this coronavirus crisis.
It made for heavy reading.
Nobody knows how the game will recover but what cannot be disputed is the game has recklessly squandered millions of dollars in cash, with nothing to show for it.
Where has the money gone?
Stories of waste have followed the ARL Commission and NRL executive almost from the moment the game got its independence in 2012 and the billion dollars in television money that soon followed.
Limousines and hire cars, bloated staff numbers on bloated wages, unnecessary costs like the millions to stage February’s Nines in Perth, where there are no plans for expansion, which so no real gain, gifts of diamond rings …
Criticism at the NRL’s performance was always swiftly deflected.
Legitimate criticisms were massaged, denied, straight out lied about or twisted to make it appear the single-minded agenda of “crisis merchants”.
Now where, really, was the crisis?
The NRL’s 2019 annual report, available on its website, declared $528 million total revenue last year.
Allocated money from that went to clubs ($228m), the NSW Rugby League and QRL ($47m) and development ($41m). There was $30 million profit.
The remaining $182 million, a staggering amount, was soaked up in NRL “running costs”.
Here again the NRL’s deception is evident. Administration costs were $20 million. On that, it doesn’t seem a lot was spent on staffing the NRL.
But it hides the truth.
Only some NRL wages were included in that. The $3.3 million spent on integrity and salary cap, for example, includes the wages of those staff.
The community and player welfare unit, for another example of largesse, spent $17 million — which includes their wages.
Then there is the football department ($25 million), insurance and finance ($12 million) and their event, game and sponsorship, a stunning $103 million.
Nobody knows how NRL is actually spending this money or if it is money well spent.
I know for certain many wages within the media unit are almost double market rate given what some staff have requested in negotiations to leave.
But when it is over an inquiry has to be launched into how the NRL has mismanaged its finances, spending $1.9 billion in broadcast money these past nine years with no assets, growth or war chest to show for it.
The $104 million in the bank reduces to $55 million when the $49 million deferred liability is taken off (to be paid in 2022), with just another $15 million in debtors to top up cash reserves.
Government mismanagement of this size would demand a Royal Commission.
And in all their largesse those people in the NRL forget about the people like Charlie Gallico. He remains a stranger to them.
None of them were ever like Charlie, turning up at Souths Juniors almost 40 years ago and volunteering to help the kids for no other reason than he loved the game.
He is a life member of the Rabbitohs, a life member of Souths Juniors and a life member of La Perouse Rugby League Club.
They are rewards for service, selfless service.
The current NRL administration are not the game’s owners but simply its caretaker, there to protect and nurture it for the next generation. Yet they are reckless.
They will ever appreciate all that Charlie Gallico, 75 years old and from Matraville, has given for the game, or would for his Rabbitohs, or why he has been the team mascot for 19 seasons and never asked for a dollar in payment. They do not know what football means to him.
When his wife Sofia died seven years ago Charlie’s heart broke in two, and his thinking was a little clouded, and somewhere in the back of his mind he knew the Rabbitohs were playing Newcastle at ANZ Stadium that Saturday and, well …
“We buried her on Friday and I didn’t know what to do,” Charlie says.
“I asked my daughters. I didn’t … I didn’t want to do it, really, because my wife had just passed, but they said, ‘Dad, mum, will be proud of you’.”
Sofia, see, loved the Rabbitohs as much as Charlie.
Before the game Mark Ellison told Charlie not to lead the Rabbitohs out this night.
The players wanted to go out first and form a guard of honour for Charlie, Ellison said, and so that night at ANZ Stadium nobody knew why it was different, why Reggie the Rabbit was being clapped onto the field by the players, but to Charlie it meant the world.
And after the Rabbitohs beat the Knights Charlie was in full Reggie mode, celebrating with the faithful, when suddenly Adam Reynolds and Issac Luke picked him up from behind.
They popped him on their shoulders and began chairing him around the ground. Charlie needed a pick-up that night.
The fans cheered and clapped Reggie, because South Sydney fans know what Reggie stands for, which is the very best of the game.
And while they chaired him, Charlie, inside that rabbit head, was bawling his eyes out. All he could think was what Sofia would think.
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The game is many people. It is not a building in Moore Park hiding an administration out of touch with its customers.
It is the players and the badge on the chest.
It’s the honest workers who take home $821.62 a week, after tax, who put away a little to take the wife and kids to the footy when they can afford it.
And it is men like Charlie Gallico, whose dream now is the same as it was 19 years ago, and whose dream he hopes survives and is at risk right now by arrogance in governance.
He has missed just two games in that time when he was rostered on.
“That’s when I had a massive heart attack,” he says.
He wants to get back in that rabbit suit for the kids, saying, “I’ll be doing it when we come back, that’s for sure.”
These are the game’s people. They deserve their game.
Kenty’s Short Shot
Independent. Always.
Or is it Independent. Sometimes?
Or perhaps Independent. A Memory …?
For some weeks now the pressure on the NRL from Channel Nine’s newspaper has been intense, with the Sydney Morning Herald’s biggest hitters calling on the NRL to shut down its competition for the welfare of the nation, supposedly.
Now we know why.
Channel Nine has stopped paying the NRL its broadcast funding, which is within its rights given no games are being played, but which also puts enormous financial pressure on the game’s survival.
It seems the Herald’s claims of independence, always, has taken a few lacerations.
While Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys is working overtime to find major cost savings to present a new rescue package to both the clubs and players next week, Nine is using the suspension of competition as a wedge to get out of its contract.
That’s because the NRL’s safest plan is to delay the season so it could run into summer, which would then impact Nine’s coverage of the cricket T20 World Cup that runs from October 18 to November 15.
So Nine wants nothing to do with the NRL being played at such a time.
And wouldn’t you know it, their newspaper arm agrees!