Paul Kent: NRL’s potential $100 million return that makes Las Vegas a gamble worth taking
The NRL has surged past 40,000 ticket sales for season opener, but that’s not where the big Las Vegas payday will come from, PAUL KENT writes.
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This Las Vegas experiment is coming along nicely.
Just the other night, for instance, a mob of anonymous rogues broke into the rooms of the likes of Bryan Fletcher and Matty Johns, bound them hand and foot, kidnapped them to some faraway bar where they chocked open their mouths with little umbrella sticks stolen from the cocktail waitress and poured some blue explosive down their delicate throats once or maybe even twice.
So damaged by the experience, they were back looking for the place again the next night, this time with Hindy and Gal in tow.
Everywhere else, the other delights of the city are on offer.
Singers in residence, magicians and illusionists who could make a pear jump from a pack of cards and squirt you in the eye and enough food to feed Napoleon’s army.
The synergy is perfect, as they say.
Where else but in this place of smoke and mirrors should rugby league choose to launch its American offensive.
Nothing is as it seems, much like rugby league.
Las Vegas was built on the back of mob money, Bugsy Seigel skimming the count on one hand threatening to stomp on a man’s head after watching him drop a cigarette butt on his new carpet back when the Flamingo launched in town.
Benny Binion ran the biggest casino in old town down Las Vegas, the Horseshoe Casino where the first World Series of Poker tournaments were held and where lives changed overnight, for good and bad, and for worse, a place where the lease Binion held was on a piece of land owned in part by Bill Coulthard, who ran the FBI’s Las Vegas office and who didn’t like what was happening at Binion’s casino so, in 1972, refused to renew Binion’s release.
That got solved when Coulthard got in his car one morning and enough explosives went off underneath the car to put him through the garage roof.
It’s that sort of town.
Old gamblers and hustlers came into town with pistols in their boots and subtlety in their hands. The last of them, Doyle Brunson, died last year after learning his trade in Texas but finding Las Vegas too hard to ignore. Like the city itself, he had become somewhat gentrified by the end.
Las Vegas is a city of grand hopes and broken hearts, of lost fortunes and short loves.
Where else, then, to launch rugby league’s invasion of America.
Some might say they share the same soul.
If it can’t be sold here, after all, it can’t be sold anywhere.
If there is anything unusual it is that so far the NRL has played it very straight when it comes selling the game to America.
Lots of solemn head nodding and marketing speak and earnest ambition.
No pads, no helmets, and all that. We just think America will love our game.
Some weeks back ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys was pushed for a little more detail and explained the reasoning behind the NRL’s promotion in Las Vegas in the terms he knows best, which is numbers.
There were 350 million people living in America, he said, and if the NRL could manage to attract even one per cent of them to watch the NRL on its Watch NRL app, a subscriber service, that would mean 35 million people paying to watch the game. That, he pointed out, was much more than the population of the whole of Australia, meaning significant cabbage.
Well, you couldn’t argue with the numbers. Even if the true trick was to find a way to attract them to actually watch this foreign game.
For instance, so far no one has been found who can explain the difference between the NRL and rugby union, rugby is just rugby here, so the challenge is big.
Still, V’landys has always been good with numbers, so Vegas should always be his kind of town.
Few can pull a pear from a balance sheet like V’landys.
When he first got the job at the NRL one of the first decisions he made was to go after the betting agencies around Australia and order them to start paying up. There were rivers of cash there for the NRL, he realised, if only they knew how to get it.
So V’landys demanded the money and the betting agencies pushed back and he threatened legal action.
The agencies were using the NRL’s intellectual property by betting on games, he argued, and should pay for that privilege.
Naturally, he romped in.
A minimal amount of payment to the NRL soon became a payment on turnover and, almost immediately, the NRL was bringing in an extra $30 million a year for doing not a lick of work more than it was already doing.
The betting agencies were now compensating the NRL.
It took V’landys to recognise it and go after the betting agencies to get it.
And, with that, this American venture begins to make sense.
All the fluff about bringing the game to America because it is a better game than the NFL and once the Americans get to see these rugby guys running into each other without helmets and pads, making them ditch the NFL and take up rugby league as a preference, is just nonsense.
NFL is too well-entrenched to ever lose its position as the biggest football code in America.
Such speak is nothing more than the kind of misdirection that made old Siegfried and Roy famous, until the tiger saw through it.
But there might be a solid reason for the NRL’s ambition.
Last year, five new American states began to regulate gambling. Before then, legalised sports gambling was basically only in Nevada.
According to the American Gaming Association, those five new states last year saw a $US10.92 billion jump in gambling revenue.
Those are the kinds of numbers that would make even V’landys swoon. Doyle Brunson, too.
But it gets even better.
In turnover, gambling rose 27.5 per cent last year to $US119.84 billion.
When you apply V’landys’ mathematical rationale to those figures — “Just one per cent” — it rises to staggering figures.
If just one per cent of the American market was betting on the NRL it would deliver the game $US109 million in revenue or $US1.19 billion in turnover each year.
It sounds fanciful, but you don’t go to Vegas without a dream, right?
Now, whether the NRL could drag in as much as one per cent is the question. But even a tenth of that, just 0.1 per cent, is still enough to make the eyes water at NRL headquarters.
Under this lens the decision to play in Las Vegas and invite American interest is a gamble that begins to make sense.
If Americans can get interested just enough to want to start having a bet on the game, with Fox Sports 1 agreeing to televise one live game a week, the cash will start flowing.
When it comes to launching in Las Vegas, it’s worth the risk of a squirt in the eye.
QUESTIONS RAISED OVER CALIFORNIA BASES
AFTER a slow start the promotion to the Las Vegas experiment is beginning to roll and a few Americans might even get along to watch the game along with the tens of thousands of Australians who are in town.
The billboards showing the games and the arrival of the Fox Sports caravan helped push interest in the game where, admittedly, the interest from the US side was worryingly slow.
Surely the presence of all four teams in Las Vegas for the trip would have benefited the promotion.
The fires were lit early on when Manly coach Anthony Seibold questioned why the other three teams were not staying in Las Vegas to promote the game.
It quickly drew a reaction from Souths’ rival Jason Demetriou, who dived back into their troubled history and returned in kind.
But given the slow boil to get American fans interested in the game, which was late but has since been seen coming, it makes you wonder why the NRL did not insist all four teams base themselves in Las Vegas.
It’s not like they were here unwillingly, after all.
When the NRL first announced it was heading to Las Vegas all the clubs were invited to submit proposals for why they should be considered and the NRL worked through them before deciding on Sunday’s teams.
It should have been a non-negotiable.
Part of the argument against it was that there were not enough facilities here for the players from all the clubs, which has some merit, but in the interests of promoting the game — which they signed up for — maybe it is worth overlooking.
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