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John Grant versus Clubland is Moneyball with menace

24th November, 2016
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John Grant will now head up the RLIF. (AAP Image/Paul Miller)
Expert
24th November, 2016
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1931 Reads

I’m not totally across it, because it’s rugby league, and it’s November 25, and the third Test of the Summer of Cricket is underway under orange, mauve and blood orange skies in Adelaide, and it’s T-minus 30 days and counting until we’re all as full as Santa’s sack, but…

… But for all 16 chairmen of all 16 clubs in our National Rugby League to tell League Central – the senior business types on the board of the Australian Rugby League Commission – that they have no confidence in the chairman of said board?

It sounds quite bad.

What’s going on? Moneyball, baby. There’s talk of ‘licence agreements’ and ‘sinking funds’ and clubs being paid 130 per cent of a salary cap League Central hasn’t decided the size of yet.

Ever seen that movie The Big Short? It’s like that, but with threats of ‘mutiny’ and ‘breakaway rebel leagues’, and sexy stuff like that.

There was a ‘memorandum of understanding’ and an ‘in-principle agreement’, and the clubs feel these have been reneged upon.

Though in a game in which contracts signed in blood are brushed all the time, well, “the cheque is in the mail” shouldn’t have washed. Probably didn’t.

And here we are. And even for rugby league, it sounds calamitous.

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What’s clear is that four of the club chieftains were mad enough to brush a meeting with chairman John Grant and CEO Todd Greenberg, and go to the pub and hatch plans.

And, with their fellow club chieftains, they submitted a vote of no-confidence in the 66-year-old former businessman, league man and civil engineer for Brisbane City Council.

ARL Commission Chamirman John Grant. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Now, Grant “brings to the ARL Commission a unique blend of business acumen and rugby league experience as well as a respected ability to combine planning and action,” according to the ARL Commission.

Such abilities “were the hallmarks of a playing career that saw the former centre for Souths in the Brisbane Rugby League represent both Queensland and Australia (each on six occasions) and graduate with honours as a Civil Engineer.”

So Grant has that going for him.

And he will need it, just as he needs the backing of NRL CEO Greenberg, who said: “John’s a good man who works hard and always puts the game first. And he’s continued to do that as the chairman, I have absolute faith in that.”

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And here, it seems, is the rub. Because while Grant may be thinking of such things as “the greater good”, “the big picture”, “the grassroots”, and so forth, the clubs are thinking, “show me the money”.

Big picture stuff is not their remit. The clubs see themselves – their players, their brands, their storied histories – as the sole power generators of all the money that television people throw at the NRL. And they can make a case. Because they are. Their employees are the actors in the dramas that so entertain us each weekend.

Not the bush. Not juniors. True, that’s where their players come from, but the clubs are a business, and many are battling. And they don’t reckon they’re getting a fair suck of a $1.8 billion souvlaki that they alone create.

Thus they’re butting heads with Grant, because he and his commission do care about the big picture. And they hold the purse strings. And they haven’t worked out how much they can give the clubs yet.

And given Parramatta Eels and Newcastle Knights and Gold Coast Titans, they’re probably right to be cautious how they dish out coin to clubs who have so often pissed it against the wall.

And you could see how that might rub Clubland the wrong way.

And here we are, again.

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Wrote a yarn Tuesday about the death of City-Country as a thing, and those few types who decried the league’s decision and wondered why there isn’t more funding for ‘the bush’, well, I’d suggest the answer lies somewhere within this latest imbroglio.

Ho-ho-ho.

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