Roosters boss Nick Politis has no plans to retire: ‘I’ll probably die on the job’
After almost 50 years in the game of rugby league Nick Politis has no plans to slow down and in an incredible inside story reveals how he rose to the top and stayed there.
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Russell Crowe won’t like reading this story. Cameron Smith should probably turn the page too.
It’s about how a car dealer from Queensland saved the Sydney Roosters, and the Rabbitohs as well.
Nick Politis, 79, did it by poaching some of the best players in the league over the past four decades, with his uncanny ability to seal the deal.
Melbourne Storm star Brandon Smith is the latest defector to the Roosters.
His comments on a podcast about Melbourne’s culture sent shockwaves through league, and ignited a storm about his playing future which is still raging.
It was another blow to the Melbourne team.
Cameron Smith still has not forgiven Cooper Cronk for leaving the Storm for sunnier skies at Bondi Junction at the end of 2017. He rejected the invitation to Cronk’s wedding to Tara Rushton with a curt text message and their cold reunion on the field in 2018 was unforgettable.
Every player of note who has one foot out of their club seems to end up at the Roosters, the oldest and only club that has played every season in the ARL/NRL.
James Tedesco, arguably the world’s best rugby league player at the moment, came over from Wests Tigers.
Sonny Bill Williams went to the Roosters twice – once in 2013 and then again in 2020 when Covid-19 killed his Canadian club Toronto Wolfpack’s move into the English Super League.
Rivals in sport and business cannot work out just how Nick Politis does it.
In the past decade, he increased his wealth 10 fold, from $200m in 2010 to more than $2bn today through his car dealerships and real estate investments.
He made one of his biggest bets in business buying out a big stake in AP Eagers, one of Australia’s largest car dealership companies just a few months before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
The share price plunged, but now he’s back in black as locked-in Australians banned from travelling overseas have poured millions into buying new cars. There are still delays of up to six months on deliveries.
And the Roosters have played in eight grand finals in the past 20 years, including a Cronk-inspired back-to-back run in 2018 and 2019.
“I’m not planning to retire yet. I’ll probably die on the job. It’s my passion, I love cars and I love the Roosters,” Politis says during a series of interviews with Sydney Weekend.
The Roosters, the Rabbitohs, and a string of other clubs, may have disappeared if it were not for Politis’s loyalty to league traditionalists, he says.
When the Rupert Murdoch-backed Super League came knocking, Politis, who had James Packer on the Easts board, said no, sacrificing the $35m in payments that code-jumping clubs received.
The code war was a battle between two of Australia’s most powerful families, the Packers and the Murdochs, over who would get the rights to show rugby league on pay TV. Hundreds of millions of dollars was spent, sending players’ wages soaring, but it ultimately ended in a muddy truce.
Politis says that his loyalty, despite unparalleled pressure at the height of the wars in 1995, cost his club dearly, but saved it in the end. And he says, it also saved his bitter rival, the Rabbitohs.
“I had five or six calls one night and I said I really couldn’t do that because I had to be loyal to the ARL,” Politis says.
“We’re a foundation club and I don’t think it would have been right for us to jump and leave the others behind.”
Other clubs would have collapsed if the Super League push was not ultimately defeated when it merged with the ARL to become the NRL in 1998, Politis says.
“If I jumped, there’s a good chance that the Rabbitohs wouldn’t be around now,” he says.
“The remaining three or four clubs would have all disappeared and we would have stayed with Super League, we might have rebadged it as a new entity but there’s a good chance some of those old clubs would have been gone forever.”
That was not the first timethat Politis saved the Roosters.
In 1976, he was the first sponsor to get his company name on a jumper.
League bosses laughed at him when he first floated the idea.
“I paid $22,000 for a 20 per cent deposit in Sydney for a Ford dealership,” Politis says.
“I needed some way to get the name over quickly and at the time Easts were the glamour side, they won back to back ’74/75.
“So I thought, well, maybe a good way to get my name over quickly, was to put my name on their jumper.
“They laughed and said ‘You can’t do that, that’s against tradition. If you put your name on it you bastardise the tradition of the jumper’.”
But he did and that generous sponsorship was the first of many cash injections Politis made into the Roosters.
When the club was on its knees in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then ARL boss John Quayle hit him up for help, and his chequebook.
The ARL was a financial basket case in the 1980s and Quayle, who was then running the league, had a rule that no failing club would be propped up. But as a former Roosters player and club administrator, it was “quite shattering” to be considering ruling a line through the famous club, he says.
So he called Politis.
Quayle has a fair idea of how much Politis poured into the Roosters, but he’s not telling.
“I know how much it was up to in my time and it was considerable,” he says.
Politis recalls the time, saying he was worried about the club’s future when Quayle called.
“I was the sponsor and the club over five or six years had lost a lot of money. They were very shaky financially,” Politis says.
He became closer and closer to the club, and took on the job as chairman in 1993.
The Super League war erupted just two years later.
But that crisis also provided an opportunity for one of the greatest recruitments at Easts, the poaching from Penrith of Brad Fittler.
“He was a superstar and he was on an ARL contract so we made a bid for him to join us,” Politis says.
“Penrith took us to court, and they lost. That was a defining moment.
“Freddy is still with us now; we’ve still got him on the payroll as an ambassador.”
According to Quayle, Politis has sacked more coaches and chief executives than anyone.
Wayne Bennett almost came across from the Broncos in 2006, but reneged on the deal when it was leaked to Queensland’s Courier-Mail newspaper.
They don’t send each other Christmas cards.
Bennett said last year he was “pissed off” at reports he and Politis had patched up their feud.
Politis listened to his players when he went to chase current coach Trent Robinson, who was coaching the Catalans Dragons in Perpignan, France, landing his signature in 2013.
“He and I have got a great understanding, our theme is to build a winning club and successful club with a good culture which shows in his nine years as coach,” Politis says.
“In the last 20 years we’ve been in eight grand finals, which is not a bad run.”
Some in league refer to him as The Godfather, and Politis, who regularly travelled to Greece before Covid-19, laughs when asked why he has the nickname.
“Other people use that term, I think because I have been around the game for 45 years,” he says.
“People come and go, but I’m still hanging in there.”
But his success with the Roosters, arguably, is in the shade when it compares with his car and real estate investments.
His stake of AP Eagers, which has 200 dealerships across the country, including Toyota, Mazda, Ford, Hyundai and Honda outlets, fell to $2.94 per share in March 2020.
The same shares were selling for $15.01 in October 2021, before dipping to $13.84 in December.
“We more than doubled our turnover and as a result, our profits more than doubled as well,” Politis says.
He also has a separate car dealership business, NGP Investments, which owns other dealers across the country.
Politis says they operate in different markets, avoiding competition or conflicts of interest.
The car industry is on the verge of change.
Mercedes-Benz has introduced fixed price selling, cutting the dealers’ bargaining power and killing the haggle.
And electric cars, which require less maintenance that petrol models, will cruel the car servicing industry where dealers make a lot of their profits.
But Politis says he is not worried, yet.
“At the moment there’s 20 million cars running around on petrol, so if you sell 100 per cent electric cars it would take you 20 years,” he says.
And Politis, who denied reports that he has given more than $800,000 to the Labor Party and $100,000 to the Liberal Party, rejects claims that fixed-price selling will make cars cheaper for consumers.
“People like to haggle and negotiate and walk out feeling like they’ve done a good deal,” he says.
“Buying a car is a complex transaction because you’ve got trade-ins.
“I think it’s a move from them (manufacturers) to make more money rather than the dealer network. Could you spend $50,000, or $100,000 online?”
A major part of the success, and value, of his car dealerships has been that Politis is landlord and tenant.
Like Gerry Harvey of retail giant Harvey Norman, he owns the real estate his cars sit on.
Politis has taken that model to the Roosters, as the club weans itself off pokies revenue.
“I don’t think you need to be Einstein to work it out,” he says.
“Pokie machines are dying slowly, the new generation are gambling online.
“The leagues clubs in areas down the coast, they’ve been dying slowly.”
The Roosters now have more than $100m in real estate investments, and a weekly cash injection from rent returns.
“We’ve decided to start investing in commercial real estate and build up a rent roll to compensate for the decline in poker machine profits,” he said.
“We’re sort of in a good place.”
Mark McInnes, a former director at the Roosters who recently ran Premier Investments for Solomon Lew, says Politis is underestimated.
Politis personally visits the families of young players the club is hoping to recruit and explains how it will work.
That breeds loyalty, McInnes says.
And rivals are on notice, Politis is not going anywhere.
‘The Godfather’ will dominate the game for years to come, says Quayle.
“He’s been retiring every year for 20 years but he won’t; football is his life.”
Originally published as Roosters boss Nick Politis has no plans to retire: ‘I’ll probably die on the job’
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