British and Irish Lions tour means $250m to Rugby Australia
Call it the $250m tour and it’s set to deliver Rugby Australia a much-needed $50m financial bonanza.
Call it the $250m tour that is set to deliver Rugby Australia a much-needed $50m financial bonanza.
The British and Irish Lions are in the country and the next month will be the best of times for rugby, at least in a monetary sense. Suddenly there’s a spring in the step for long-suffering and rusted-on rugby aficionados at the top end of town.
No longer do they have to hide their affection for the Wallabies and their beloved code, and blush about the lack of Bledisloe Cup success in recent decades. Instead, expect the most prestigious office towers to be empty and office workers to be at rugby luncheons and other functions until early August.
It is all because the Lions and their up to 40,000 cashed-up fans are here, and ready to spend.
Along with renewed optimism from Wallabies fans from Darwin to Perth, Melbourne to Brisbane. And definitely Sydney. So excited are locals that they’re even putting their money where their mouths are, pumping $20m into the Rugby Future Fund that was established only late last year.
Rugby Australia chief executive Phil Waugh, a former Wallaby who was a ballboy at the 1989 Lions versus Australia Test at the then Sydney Football Stadium, calls it the “golden decade” for rugby, which started last weekend in Perth for what was the Western Force’s biggest ever crowd.
“That was the first game of the Lions tour and then we’ve got this great month coming up, then we’ve got the Rugby World Cup here in 2027, the Women’s World Cup in 2029 and then the Brisbane 2032 Olympics,” he says.
Wednesday night’s Lions versus Queensland match in Brisbane was a sellout, and Saturday night’s clash between the Lions and NSW Waratahs is set to be the biggest crowd ever at the rebuilt 45,500-capacity Allianz Stadium.
“We’re on track for a record attendance given the interest from our [stadium] members,” Venus NSW chairman David Gallop says. “It shows how important rugby is to our members and how important rugby is to the Moore Park precinct. We’ll have tens of thousands of overseas visitors here, and we’re looking forward to hopefully having a sellout for the Test match at Accor Stadium in August.”
That match will be the third of the Test series, which starts in Brisbane on July 19 and moves to the 100,000-capacity Melbourne Cricket Ground a week later. There are further tour matches in Canberra, Adelaide and Melbourne.
The nine matches and events around each game means the Lions tour is set to be a financial windfall for Rugby Australia, which has been battling financially for years and at one stage had just about the worst balance sheet in Australian sport.
Rugby Australia’s revenue in 2024 was $126m. The Lions tour should help double that to about $250m this year – a record – and the organisation is expecting a $50m surplus and the paying off of its burdensome $63.5m debt.
More than 500,000 tickets should be sold across the Lions matches, and the tour is forecast to inject upwards of $400m into local economies.
“We’re delivering all nine games, the six provincial matches and three Tests, so that’s ticketing, hospitality, in-stadium entertainment, around the venues, everything,” says Waugh.
“Then we’re trying to put as many events around matchday, like corporate lunches and gold days. We’ve even gone as far as delivering a darts tournament in Adelaide and Brisbane.
“When you’ve got 40,000 tourists coming here, and given how mad they are about their darts in the UK, you try to be as creative as possible.”
Waugh wants Rugby Australia to safeguard some of the returns its makes from the Lions tour and World Cups in a strategy similar to the Australian Olympic Committee, which now has $190m in its foundation that began with its proceeds from the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Meanwhile, the likes of Wallabies legend John Eales are backing the sport with their own money via the Rugby Future Fund, with about 25 investors having put in $20m.
The fund eventually wants $100m and aims to generate returns for the investors, with money managed by fund managers who will forgo all or part of their fees, then directed towards women’s or community rugby projects or high-performance aspects of the code via the Australian Rugby Foundation.
In just eight months the Rugby Future Fund has grown by 7 per cent, outperforming the ASX 300’s 4.4 per cent return in the same period. Its stock-pickers include Geoff Wilson, the self-described broken-down former second-rower who played rugby for Victoria and now heads Wilson Asset Management, Doug Tynan at GCQ and Dave Allen at Plato.
The fund was started last year after ARF chairman Ben Scott, a founding partner of investment bank Barrenjoey, met with Wilson and other rugby-mad fund managers and Rugby Australia officials to plot a financial comeback for the sport.
Wilson and Scott have been travelling together to Lions matches, and after attending the Brisbane game and Sydney on Saturday, are contemplating heading to Canberra next week.
They will attend all three Tests and insist they will try to mix pleasure with business by also trying to drum up support for the Rugby Future Fund. But can the Wallabies perform on the field and make some dreams come true for local fans like them too?
“We’d settle for a 1 per cent outperformance against the Lions,” says Scott optimistically. “That’s all it takes.”
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