The JGC and NRC are not intended to be money making. They are primarily development initiatives of which Perth desperately needs. The ITM Cup in New Zealand has never made a profit as a competition.
$25m in higher ARU revenues means there is enough to keep these going.
Absolutely right.
I think there's some woolly thinking about money, sports and rugby in this country.
A sport being 'professional' doesn't mean it must be profitable, unless it has investors to satisfy. Woe be the day when sport becomes about shareholder value. The commercial purpose of rugby in Oz is to take money in one way, and spend it in another. So money comes in from TV, and gets spent on the grassroots.
Obviously, the more income there is then the more we can do for the game, and a healthy cash reserve makes the sport more secure, but it's not the job of the sport to make profits: it's to spend them. It's not the role of the ARU to make money: it's to organise rugby.
The most important people in rugby in Australia are the players, at every level. The unpaid officials come next. Then the fans who go to games. The Norms who flick the TV button are a distant last.
We often act as though we're the main stakeholders in sport, because we pay the bills, but we're not. The purpose of the game is to provide something for people to play, not for people to watch.
The Supe provinces aren't organised to make profits. Their business model is to be subsidised by the ARU. There's nothing wrong with that. That subsidy is their share of that money. It would be wonderful if they could routinely generate a surplus from gate takings and sponsorship, but often they can't. That would require a re-organised television deal.
When they make a 'loss', that's not a failure. It's expected. When they make a 'profit', that's a bonus.
Of course they're not intended to make terrible losses either. Mismanagement is mismanagement. The reason they get ARU money is so that they can spend it effectively.
I think the Force is a special case. They've never recovered from the Firepower fiasco. They lost key players, suffered a great deal of bad press, had to re-organise financially, recuitment suffered, results suffered, and the game in Perth declined from where it might have been.
As a current Perth resident, I find Force games at NIB incredibly exciting. It's a great 'product'.
