NRL18.3: Bears are BACK
We don't have to talk about expansion or the Bears anymore
Previously in our series:
The Australian Rugby League Commission has reached an historic agreement with the Western Australian Government that will see the National Rugby League’s 18th franchise based in Perth.
If you are one of those ‘orality is asserting its dominance over literacy’ people, you can watch a video of Roger Cook that is much longer than it would take to just read what he’s saying.
But then I guess you wouldn’t get the unsettling feeling that this is a deep fake.
The SMH put together a FAQ, which I am going to summarise for my handsome readers:
NRL team in Perth starting 2027 (…or 2028)
Five year licence (established clubs have 10 year licences, expiring 20341)
The club will be a membership-based, not-for-profit organisation
The board will be chaired by West Australian with two other board members from WA
For the first five years, the club’s sole voting member will be the Australian Rugby League Commission
WA government to provide $60 million in direct financial assistance, with $35 million ring-fenced for development, including grassroots
WA Government to provide an additional $5.6 million in support through Tourism WA
No money to the ARLC or the NRL, all spent in WA
No licence fee
No upgrades to HBF Park
Or you can read essentially the same story on ESPN, The Guardian or the ABC. You’ll note the better resolution of information than we got for the PNG team.
The ARLC will be the only voting member of the Western Bears for the first five years and covering the initial running costs. With a $12 million salary cap, another $5 or $6 million on the footy department, a couple mil for sales and travel, that seems like a substantial outlay for our glorious but notoriously tight-fisted leader. The central distribution would cover most of that anyway, so the NRL is really covering the gap between the margin on ticket sales and whatever it costs to sell those tickets and put together a football team on short notice.
Even so, the ARLC is doing what I never thought they would: staking money and resources to get a team off the ground in Perth. Kudos. I can’t wait for them to play the Storm, their natural rivals, in Adelaide.
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Hey, so about that…
I couldn’t help but notice that Roger Cook never said the word “Bear”. One assumes most Perthicans will be unfamiliar with the detailed history of the NRL required to know whomst the Bears are.
Contrary to popular belief, the Bears have not been in the NRL for over a quarter of a century and do not have hundreds of thousands of fans, so are not well known outside of the kind of people who read this newsletter or at least can distinguish a grounding from a bobble. A mid-reel Nick Campton-level history or a Maroon Observer-style dissection might distract from the message of ‘we’re getting a NRL team and it's not costing us that much and none of the money is going to those bastards on the east coast’, so that seems fine.
The NRL did name check the Bears in their press release:
Mr V’landys was excited at the prospect of combining the heritage rugby league brand of the North Sydney Bears with the vibrant sporting community of WA.
“As a foundation club, the Bears have a rich history in the game and automatically provide hundreds of thousands of East Coast supporters for the Perth based team. The heritage of the Bears combined with the energy of the West will have this team flying from the outset,” Mr V’landys said.
As regular readers will know and new readers will find unsurprising, I do not find the Bears’ return particularly compelling. I have no strong feelings about the Bears per se2 but I think what happened to them probably should have happened to a lot of other clubs and cultural institutions, in both the sport and the country more generally.
Returning North Sydney, making a deal about their status as a “foundation club” (of a competition that no longer exists) and their beleaguered, largely unsuccessful history, is a step towards greater Sydney-centrism that a Perth NRL team should dissipate. It is another example of Phillip Street privileging a certain part of rugby league’s wider heritage because it occurs in a specific subset of postcodes and satisfies a vanishingly few and increasing elderly group of people.3
But I have been alive and doing this long enough to recognise that absolutely no one gives a shit about any of that, so let’s just accept it for what it is and get on with it. The Bears’ return won’t have quite the same seismic cultural impact of the PNG team but it will have it’s moments. Like when the Dolphins have landed their signature wins over the last couple of years, there’ll come a moment where something new happens and we’ll think ‘gee, we’ve got something here’.
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What is interesting about the shotgun wedding of the Western Australian government and the North Sydney Bears, officiated by Peter V’Landys himself, is how the marriage will work and how it will fit into the league. So here are my questions.
Question number 1
What role do the North Sydney Bears actually play in the Western Bears, assuming that is in fact the new team’s name?
North Sydney aren’t going to have an equity share in the club, as the club will eventually be a member-based NFP, once the ARLC have gotten the club off the ground. It is hard to imagine North Sydney-based members outnumbering the Perth-based ones in the long run.
There are at most two board seats available. I would assume most boards would keep one of those available for an independent, rather than letting Billy Moore and James Bracey come in and pound the table on behalf of the eastern side of the arrangement, but who knows? That will perhaps prevent the licence from being counted as another Sydney vote, for whatever that matters.
It seems like that North Sydney will be the feeder team and that Western will adopt a new ursine logo (trademark pending) and the red and black colour scheme (one hopes that they also add white and gold). Is that it? A board seat, maybe, and some clothing and the nickname? Is that really the Bears being back? Is this an easily foreseeable source of tension between the factions on how much the Bears are back, or have WA successfully negotiated a position where the actual foundation club is effectively powerless?
Either way, the risk that North Sydney will abscond with the licence after Perth is deemed to have “not worked out” seems to have been successfully negated, so that’s a good start.
Question number 2
Cook made it very clear that there was no licence fee being paid. As explained last time, the Controlling Body seems confused about what licence fees are for:
The reporting as to why the bids were rejected, especially in WA’s case, was extremely muddled. Fox reported that the NRL expected a “$20 million licence fee for the first two years” - what does that mean? From Andrew Webster:
“Redcliffe weren’t required to pay a licence fee because their licensed club guaranteed long-term financial viability.
The NRL insisted the WA bid pay a fee – about $15 million to $20 million – because they were in a rugby league outpost and their financial position wasn’t as strong as that of the Dolphins.”
It makes no sense that a licence fee would be a guarantee of long-term financial viability. In American pro leagues, expansion teams pay a licence fee to the existing owners to reflect the dilution of their share of the centralised league revenue and because by granting a licence, the expansion team has gone from nothing to having an asset worth billions in a manner of moments.
It is not clear why a licence fee is no longer required, especially when it was the main reason the private bid was rejected, but the above would suggest that the WA government is sufficiently stable that the NRL needs no financial guarantees, even though this is not what a licence fee is for. Great stuff.
Which leads us to who benefits? Why did the existing clubs agree to this?
Last time, PVL squeezed another $15 million out of Kayo by offering more Broncos games behind the paywall and offering Nine Dolphins games as an Aldi-style substitute. That money meant the NRL and clubs came out ahead by admitting the Dolphins, and V’Landys got to look like a man who could get things done.4 Unlike the PNG team, which is paying $68 million directly to the clubs to approve their admission to the league, there is no guaranteed money for the NRL clubs for admitting this team.
However, there is a new broadcast deal starting in 2027, the earliest date at which a new Perth team would take to the field. V’Landys has been very clear that he believes the next NRL deal should be bigger than the AFL deal. The NRL has better total viewership (although game to game, I’m not so confident on) but has historically had less inventory to offer.
19 teams should take the NRL to 228 games per year (assuming the 24 game schedule remains in place), compared to 207 for the current alignment of the AFL (which might go to 218 if Tasmania gets off the ground), but NRL games are a little shorter, so it probably comes out in the wash as about the same.
My guess is that PVL is staking pretty much his entire chairmanship on getting a good enough broadcast deal that no major stakeholder - the players, the coaches, the administrators - feels like they’re getting short changed, despite now having to travel to Perth and Port Moresby.
Good luck to him. The last deal was “$2 billion”, although no real detail was ever provided on that. The next is expected to be “$3 billion” and the media, which PVL definitely does not interfere with, will carry enough water that this will seem like a huge result, even though there’s enough in inflation alone to make it seem like a huge throbbing WAR CHEST has been dropped on the NRL. I don’t doubt he’ll get through with at most a mild scathing in the Daily Telegraph.
Question number 3
What about NRL20? Surely they won’t want to keep having byes forever! Will it be SEQ4 or NZ2?
We obviously have no answers to these questions but here are some notes if you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about should the most deranged lunatic you know drag you into a conversation about the merits of Adelaide versus Christchurch:
No more new teams will be admitted until after the next broadcast rights cycle is concluded. Given that cycle has not yet been negotiated, we can speculate that will be 2030 or 2032 at the earliest. You should do your population growth analysis and talent pool charting accordingly.
Ben Ikin has given SEQ4 a nudge in the last couple of weeks to keep the evil AFL out of the western suburbs. This would most likely take the form of a Jets/Jets bid that we talked about last year but who knows. I take it that means the Firehawks died when Shane Richardson left Coorparoo for Concord.
North Ipswich Reserve finally secured funding for a rebuild: $40 million for a 2,000 seat grandstand. What a return on investment for Ipswich’s first LNP mayor under a new LNP state government in the only state the LNP can rely on for federal seats. Presumably as we edge closer to that prospect becoming reality, more seats will be added, courtesy of an LNP desperate for relevance, to make North Ipswich resemble something like Redcliffe, but without the pleasant sea breeze or proximity to water and the fact that you’re in Ipswich.
There are notionally several New Zealand bids. Some look better on paper than others but none of them seem to have any money. The existing clubs, especially the Warriors, and Australian broadcasters will probably be disinterested in subsidising a new team unless it can show PVL the colour of its money. One assumes that would come via an enlarged Sky NZ deal but it’s not clear what appetite they have for it. Otherwise, it’s a licence fee and if the current market rate is $4 million per existing team, you can do the maths on that.
No one is talking about Adelaide. The NRL has a trademark application out for the old Rams logo (not sure how Steve Mascord feels about that) but they have swept up a lot of the heritage IP, presumably to sell back to us at inflated rates on cheaply made throwback jerseys that I will buy all of.
People will tell you that SEQ doesn't need or deserve another team. I'm here to remind you that need, want and deserve do not apply here. The next team will be accepted if there's money in it for the existing teams and if it can convince the NRL it can function. That's it. Very few people wanted the Dolphins. The one charity case the sport had has been sent to Perth. And don’t give me shit about “real” expansion. What is that?
Two more big derby games for the Broncos is a lot more appealing than the little cousin of the team broadcasters already hate having to put on TV, never mind having to deal with the PNG team, and it will be much easier to assemble rugby league infrastructure into a NRL club in Ipswich than Christchurch.
Personally, I’d prefer both but then we’d have to sacrifice a Sydney club to make room and convince another to move to South Australia. What hope do we have of that?
We couldn’t even get rid of the Bears.
I took this from the Broncos’ annual report, the only reliable reporting on licencing arrangements.
I own two throwback jerseys for whatever that’s worth.
On the other hand, if this is your chance to get off whatever crumb-bum franchise you’re currently on (e.g. Titans, Dragons, etc), I say take it.
Good things? Well, we’ll have to wait and see about that.