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Let the weak clubs die.

Round 20

That’s been growing chorus among NRL stakeholders as the game tries to negotiate its way through a period of non-competition.

Andrew Johns thinks 12 teams is the ideal number, Greg Alexander and Cooper Cronk sense natural attrition is coming, while stronger clubs seem to have little sympathy for the battlers at the moment.

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Just exactly who the battlers are remains to be seen, it really depends on what criteria you apply.

I do remember when the South Sydney Rabbitohs were the battlers, the year was … well, most of the 1990s.

The Rabbitohs struggled to get a win, a crowd, a sponsor, and big-name players.

Then along came this thing called Super League, and you wouldn’t believe it, one of rugby league’s most storied clubs didn’t meet the criteria.

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It didn’t matter that the criteria were arbitrarily applied, at an arbitrary point in time, after an almost century long existence, South Sydney was kicked out of the competition … until their fans marched them back in.

History, passion, and intergenerational pride drove more than one hundred thousand people to publicly protest the culling of a product most of them hadn’t purchased for some time, if at all.

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It didn’t make sense, but it was a valuable lesson for the code: prioritise profit over passion at your own peril.

How quickly we forget.

Over the years many have tried to solve the problem of why most professional sporting franchises lose money.

If you look across the NRL there are probably 12 of the 16 clubs who either run at a loss or barely break even.

This despite all clubs getting the same funding from head office and spending the same amount on players.

The key differentiators come in the form of non-grants based revenue (often determined by local market conditions) and cost management.

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In other words, the profitable clubs are better at making money and saving money.

But here’s the kicker: responsible financial management doesn’t mean a cracker to fans.

Fans have no connection to bottom line, they value history and community above all else, and profitable clubs don’t necessarily have a large, engaged fan base.

And therein lies the paradox of sport.

In their book Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stafan Szymanski explain why sport is a business like no other, using the English Premier League as the example.

“Football is huge. Footballers are some of the most famous people on earth. The most watched program is generally the World Cup final. Yet, most football clubs are puny businesses. This is because the clubs haven’t been able to make more than a tiny share from our love of football. Football is mostly watched on TV, with fans expending much of their passion over internet sites and on social media. Chelsea cannot charge fans for reading or talking about Chelsea.”

Economists call this problem appropriability; the failure to convert (appropriate) passion into profit.

It explains why one hundred thousand people marched for the Rabbitohs but only a fraction of them were turning up to games.

So why march?

Because they were the sons and daughters of people who did go to games, who loved the club because their mother or grandfather did.

Their passion was inherited.

They still watched their beloved Rabbitohs, but at home with family, or in a bar with mates, every week without fail.

You can also bet there was a group of people in that crowd who despised South Sydney.

But they knew being a Rooster wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun if they couldn’t beat the Bunnies.

And what was true for the Rabbitohs then is true for the Sharks and Sea Eagles now.

While rationalisation has become the buzz word in most industries, the NRL should only consider reducing the size of its club grants and salary caps, not the competition.

Protecting the Sydney clubs is especially important.

Sydney is the heartbeat of our game, and its 9 clubs form a system that functions best when all individual parts work together in an environment of manageable disdain.

It’s called tribalism, and the foundation of sport the world over.

The system would be weaker for not having “rednecks” from the Shire or a team on the “insular peninsular” (being from Queensland I’ve known such insults).

The 9 clubs don’t operate separately from one another, they service the entire city together.

Heroes and villains, lightweights and powerbrokers, battlers and silvertails, having one makes being the other infinitely more fun.

Not forgetting, if any of those clubs fold the market immediately decreases, a lesson learned from the demise of the North Sydney Bears.

And less teams doesn’t just mean fewer fans, it also means less games, which gives the NRL less to sell to broadcasters, who will in turn be televising games to a smaller market.

That’s the opposite of a sound strategic plan.

As rugby league recalibrates in the coming months, one can only hope Peter V’landys remains committed to his vow that all clubs will survive.

If that requires differential funding, financial and operational audits, NRL intervention, ownership changes, then so be it.

The real strength of sport lies not in the profitability of the code, but in the connection fans have to their club.

It doesn’t matter who owns the club, who runs the club, who plays for the club, just that the club, its history and community, continues to exist.

The game has been going for over one hundred years, and there are some clubs at a point in their financial cycle similar to the Rabbitohs of the 1990s.

It wasn’t right to abandon South Sydney then, and the game shouldn’t be prioritising profit over passion today, they would do so at their own peril.

Hell, look at the Rabbitohs now!