Coronavirus fallout means rugby league will never be the same
Amid all the uncertainty, there is one thing about which there is no doubt. Rugby league will never be the same.
Rugby league will never be the same.
When the game eventually resumes in two months, six months or even next year, it might be without a handful of the 16 clubs.
That’s how serious it is.
Peter V’landys has said all along coronavirus would have a “catastrophic” effect on the code if it were forced to shut down. And it will. There is absolutely no guarantee all clubs will survive.
Player salaries will be slashed by a minimum of 25 per cent. The salary cap will shrink from $9.6 million to about $7m.
The NRL now employs 140 full-time staff. Those numbers will be slashed.
There’s no question some of the Sydney clubs are facing enormous challenges like every other business.
When NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced she was shutting the doors of all licensed premises on Sunday, it meant the likes of Canterbury, Parramatta, Penrith and Wests Ashfield would now struggle to prop up the football clubs.
In recent years these four NRL teams have relied on grants of between $3m and $10m to stay afloat. That cash is now gone.
So have weekly ticket sales, season memberships, corporate suites and match-day advertising.
And now the TV broadcast money from Fox Sports and Channel 9 cuts off.
This is a bigger crisis than the Super League war. In those days money was the least of their problems. Only three of the Sydney clubs don’t rely on poker machine money these days — Manly, South Sydney and Cronulla, who closed their club before Christmas.
Still, Manly are just one of many clubs facing an uncertain future, with the Penn family rumoured for the past 12 months to want to sell up.
They don’t mind losing one or two million each year but they won’t sit back and soak up bigger losses
The same goes for the privately owned Gold Coast Titans, whose owners, the Frizelle family, are already experiencing tough enough times in the car industry.
Full marks to the NRL and V’landys for doing their best to keep the competition going.
They had no choice because the game has no money.
Players will have no choice but to take pay cuts. But then hundreds of thousands of workers around the country are in a much worse position than they are.
Interestingly, the licences of the 16 clubs are up for renewal at the end of next season.
The game will have to start again. And it will be with a new streamlined management at NRL headquarters. Right now the NRL has 140 fulltime employees — compared to the English Premier League, which has only 120.
We need smarter minds on the independent commission who will put future investment ahead of player payments and club handouts.
That way next time we have a catastrophe of this magnitude, we’ll at least be better equipped to cope with it.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Buzz’s highlights, lowlights: Moses’ hypocrisy exposed in Brown saga
Mitchell Moses has no right to publicly chime into the debate about his halves partner Dylan Brown staying loyal to Parramatta. Plus Buzz reveals his highlights and lowlights.
30 NRL coaches sacked in ruthless decade: Why Benji won’t be 31
There have been 30 NRL coaches sacked in less than a decade. Phil ‘Buzz’ Rothfield asks Wests Tigers boss Shane Richardson - who has axed three coaches in his career - whether Benji Marshall will be 31.