AFLW 2024 - Round 9 - Indigenous Round - Chat, game threads, injury lists, team lineups and more.
A majority agree that NO SPORT should rely on taxpayers.V'landys wants even more Australian taxpayers money to fund the proposed PNG NRL side.
‘It is D-Day’: Peter V’landys prepared to walk away from PNG NRL expansion bid
Rugby league bosses are meeting with federal government in Brisbane, with Papua New Guinea out to become 18th NRL clubwww.theguardian.com
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yeah, it is a lot of money 60 mil a year for 10 years.Surprised they are going ahead with this. But then again when you are gifted 600 million from the taxpayer it helps.
Why 'done' $600m expansion deal is 'about China'
Albanese poised to announce agreement
geech........I guess it will be a compound, like an army barracks. I am sure the PNG government would want it to be a success.
It’s cheap and would be great if it worked. It’s just hard to imagine it working.
They would almost be all PNG players anyway. It would be a virtual PNG national side.
Which is a state league level team.
Dare say these these teams wouldn't be playing in Australia without the Italian diaspora.Excellent crowd at Optus last night for AC Milan v AS Roma - 56,522. Plenty of Italians in the crowd
Typical lies from Bogan V'Landys and the NRL
Funny numbers mean success for the NRL
The NRL inflated crowd figures for its Las Vegas showcase, highlighting that official numbers are art and science.www.afr.com
Earlier this year, NRL and Racing NSW supremo Peter V’landys put down a marker for what “success” would look like for rugby league’s season curtain-raiser in Las Vegas.
If the sport could get a crowd of 40,000 for the double-header featuring South Sydney, Manly, Sydney Roosters and Brisbane Broncos, the audacious gamble would have paid off.
When the NRL’s “official attendance” came through in March, it showed: 40,746. Mission accomplished! Though, in a mark of restraint, no sign of V’landys at the nearest aircraft carrier.
NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo (left), Fox Corp chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, and ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys in Las Vegas.
But how credible was that 40,746 figure, really?
The Las Vegas Raiders recently released a Q1 report for the city’s stadium authority. It’s a routine exercise from the team that calls Allegiant Stadium home, and is aimed at giving a clear idea exactly how many people are brought to Sin City for events.
Raiders NFL executive Adam Feldman said there had been 26 events held in the 60,000 seater stadium. The top attendance was the Taylor Swift-infused Super Bowl (61,629), the Raiders’ regular-season game against Denver (54,805), and then a concert by K-Pop girl group Twice (37,395). As for the NRL’s opening round, it was attended by 31,927 people.
This will hardly surprise rugby league insiders, as calculating “official” stadium figures is an elegant mix of art and science. One source described to us how they would arrive at figures by receiving the entry gate numbers, then sprinkling somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent on top to account for employees, VIPs and other support staff at the ground.
If you thought counting the staff pulling beers as the crowd was a bit suss, don’t worry, we did, too!
So, did the NRL add more than 25 per cent to the turnstile figure to meet its own metric for figuring it a “success”? An NRL spokesman pointed to other sporting events held at Allegiant where numbers had been boosted between 10 and 30 per cent. The NRL just happened to be right on the button. Naturally.
Factors by numbers
Even so, marking one’s own homework does not assure success. As part of the Las Vegas round, journalists and editors from across the media were flown to the United States. Joining Foxtel boss Patrick Delany, News Corp’s Lachlan Murdoch and Nine’s Mike Sneesby in the stadium was Sydney Morning Herald editor Bevan Shields, the latter’s Vegas trip paid for by the NRL having something to do with his publication’s parent company Nine Entertainment being the sport’s broadcaster (The Australian Financial Review is also owned by Nine).
“Nearly 41,000 people were in the stadium, a number I believe makes the Las Vegas gamble a winner,” Shields wrote in an editorial, for which he gave V’landys and co “kudos”.
It wouldn’t be the only fuzzy line to mark this exercise. In the month before the trip, the NRL’s top brass gave an expansive interview to the Herald.
“The size of the [US] market and the size of the economy is just so big,” NRL CEO Andrew Abdo said. “To put that in perspective, Australia – by GDP and by population – would be the equivalent of one of the big states in America. And there’s 50 of them.
“So, it’s 50 times the opportunity.”
But there are only two US states with the population of this country (California and Texas), and only a few more with anything like the equivalent GDP. Lucky for Abdo, no one pointed this out. The masthead just put it in the headline. And its own contributions to the NRL’s funny numbers shouldn’t go unremarked.
In the same pre-Vegas interview, V’landys spruiked how signing up Americans to its Watch NRL streaming app was a big part of the US opportunity.
“If we can get 1 per cent over five years, that’s 34 million (sic) people,” the masthead quoted him saying. “You times that by $US169 (an annual subscription to the app), that’s around $US577 million.”
Three weeks later, and after we publicly flagged that 1 per cent of the US population was actually 3.4 million, the quote was quietly changed online. That one was on the Herald rather than V’landys, though clearly everyone’s a bit bamboozled by the fact more people live outside Australia than in it.
This tendency for fantastic number-blurring – regurgitated or flung in the footy media – may seem a bit harmless. By the NRL’s telling, the code is having another record year. So, who cares if the crowd was only 30,000, or that America is not made up of dozens of Floridas? After all, this is footy mate, and we can get on board or piss off.
The thing is, though, V’landys has been in negotiations with Anthony Albanese over whether the federal government will stump up $600 million to put an 18th rugby league team in Papua New Guinea – something broadcaster Ben Fordham recently said was a done deal.
It’s part of the government’s geopolitical anti-China play. So, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade must be beyond thrilled to hear about Abdo’s target addressable market for Port Moresby.
Is it lies?
As a Labor and Australian Football supporter this is a bad move by Albanese and it won't go down well outside NSW and QLD!
There's still a long way to go until a team is confirmed.
Pepole also ignored Hitler and his Nazis and thought they would fissle out and we all know how thet turned out!
It sounds like not many NRL fans are keen on the PNG team either.
