The Breakdown podcast: “Don’t allow them to piss it up against the wall”
How Australian rugby set itself on a path for financial catastrophe.
It was at a Sydney schoolboy rugby game between Riverview and Shore where a conversation between Olympic chief John Coates and then rugby boss John O’Neill took place that could have saved rugby union from today’s financial hell.
As their boys played rugby in the early Noughties, Coates told O’Neill to lock up the expected 2003 World Cup windfall in a ‘war chest’.
O’Neill recalls Coates saying: “Unless you do something like that, it will be pissed up against the wall.”
The episode is detailed in today’s episode of The Breakdown, The Australian’s ball-tearing new podcast about how Australian rugby ended up broke and overlooked.
The episode also includes an exclusive interview with former Prime Minister John Howard recalling the night he and wife Janette skolled rum and coke from the Webb Ellis trophy after the Wallabies won the World Cup in 1999.
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“We had a dinner at the Lodge for the players and wives or girlfriends. And we all drank out of the cup. We had the William Web Ellis trophy, we had the Bledisloe Cup and we had the Cook Cup, which is England and Australia. There was no Mandela. This was 1999,” Mr Howard said.
“It was before the Mandela trophy had been inaugurated. And yeah, we did drink out of that. We did,” Mr Howard said.
“And my wife joined in and it was a great night and it was a terrific night. And I really had a great crowd of blokes and wives and girlfriends, of course. And it was terrific night.”
Today while the Coates-led Australian Olympic Committee has grown its Sydney Games windfall into a $170m war chest, Rugby Australia was $20m in deficit last year.
“I knew we were going to make a lot of money and I wanted to lock the money up,” O’Neill tells The Breakdown. “And there were those that did not want that to happen.”
Coates also recalls the meeting in today’s episode of The Breakdown and speaks to the value of investing a major events windfall. Coates, who is part of the 2027 World Cup bid committee, is understood to be recommending a long-term investment strategy if Australia wins the rights to host that event.
Tuesday’s episode also explores what happened when O’Neill told the then ARU board he wanted to “lock up” the money and also touches on his radical idea to merge rugby league and rugby union.
Back in the early 2000s O’Neill’s thinking was if he could accumulate a war chest of $100m from the World Cup he could knock off rugby league by simply buying up league’s best players.
The idea leaked in 2002 and O’Neill was immediately rebuked by world rugby bosses but he wasn’t daunted.
Soon he was meeting billionaire Kerry Packer in his Sydney office.
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O’Neill reveals they mapped out a plan on the whiteboard in Packer’s Park Street office.
“If you reunified the game, how potent would it be?” O’Neill tells The Breakdown. “Anyway, after about a week, (Packer) called me back and said, ‘look, it was really appreciate the conversation, but if I was 10 years younger, I’d have a crack. But now I’ll pass.’ So but look, again, conceptually, it would have been very hard to do. And, you know, the powerbrokers in the northern hemisphere would have been absolutely dropping the gin and tonics, but it would have been it would have been terrific to reunify the game.”
Tuesday’s episode also explores the glory days of Australian rugby, featuring exclusive interviews with former Wallabies captains Phil Kearns, Nick Farr-Jones, John Eales and George Gregan, who open up on Australia’s golden days, of ticker-tape parades, World and Bledisloe Cups and what made the team so successful.
Come back tomorrow for Episode 3: The kick that broke rugby’s heart
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