The National Stadium bid is already fatiguing Aucklanders but stay tuned because a lot is at stake; the Hollywood face of the South Island NRL expansion bid will be revealed in Las Vegas; Silver Lake’s disastrous A-League venture raises red flags; are Super Rugby’s Melbourne Rebels dead?; And all the
Auckland stadium debate is turning into a mess, as South Island league bid reveals Hollywood link - Sports Insider
By Trevor McKewen
NZ Herald·
14 mins to read
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Oh, joy.
The Herald’s Chris Rattue this week aptly summed up the “stadium fatigue” Aucklanders are already feeling. And it’s only February.
But here’s a plea from somebody who is now into the second decade of the interminable Eden Park v The Waterfront saga and watched in despair in the years ahead of the 2011 World Cup final as council waved away an offer from Labour’s Trevor Mallard to build a decent stadium.
Hang in there because there’s a lot at stake. And, encouragingly, it also seems like Mayor Wayne Brown is determined to flush out some councillors’ misplaced parochial interests which are actually costing Aucklanders money.
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So, here are three simple guidelines that, amid the blur of racy renders and creative accounting, might assist in staying focussed on what the real issues are in this debate…
1. Remember Your History
This is particularly relevant when it comes to Eden Park and the council itself.
Eden Park was referred to as “the elephant in the room” in an independent review of Auckland’s Council Controlled Organisations (CCOs), secretly presented to councillors behind closed doors in February 2019 – meaning it was penned more than five years ago.
The report noted that as an independently owned stadium, Eden Park sits outside the CCOs mandate. Yet the stadium had a huge influence on what it could and couldn’t do while representing a massive financial liability to the council because it requires council funding to operate and doesn’t have cash for maintenance and expansion.
It also pointed out that “despite this considerable financial help” from council, it appoints none of the nine directors to the Eden Park Trust Board.
“In short, Eden Park, like the Auckland War Memorial Museum, enjoys the protection of special legislation, is heavily funded by the council but is not accountable to it or ratepayers,” the report noted.
The year before the report, the council’s chief executive had tried and failed to work out an agreement with the Eden Park Trust that would allow it to be run alongside a joint venture with Auckland’s three other main stadiums while still leaving ownership in the trust’s hands.
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That was a sensible and logical direction to take, one adopted at about that time in Sydney in 2020 when the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust and Venues NSW merged under one board.
Sydneysiders now have a sports precinct (AFL, NRL, A-League, Super Rugby, cricket) in Moore Park that Aucklanders can only gaze upon from this side of the Ditch with envy.
2. Do The Maths: We Can’t Afford Four Stadiums
The same confidential report also made it crystal clear to councillors that Auckland did not need – and could not afford – four major sports stadiums (Eden Park, Western Springs, Albany and Mt Smart).
And that sitting on their hands was not an option for councillors.
It highlighted multiple issues with the city’s stadium stock beyond just Eden Park including roof and stand issues at Mt Smart and Albany and warned of the council suffering “financial and reputational risks” if it continued to procrastinate.
Then this biggie: Doing nothing would commit the council to a capital spend of more than $600m over the next 20 years versus just over $300m if it implements a new venue development strategy.
Remember this report and recommendation is now more than five years old and nothing has happened. No wonder the Mayor isn’t happy.
That $600m forecast capex was also made before Eden Park presented itself to the public to try and remain a contender in the National Stadium Debate.
Add in the post-Cyclone Gabrielle remedial work needed at Western Springs of up to $120m and upgrades to Mt Smart and a couple of parochial North Shore-based councillors trying to save Albany… well, you get my drift.
The cost to the ratepayer of keeping the status quo and supporting Eden Park in the national stadium debate is terrifying and not being made clear to the public.
It also means it will be cheaper to build a new stadium on the waterfront than sticking with what we’ve got.
One last thing with Eden Park: the smoke and mirrors around how it recently reported its financials is warning enough of treating its campaign with ongoing cynicism.
What its reporting conveniently ignores is that in the statutory accounts, it posted a $21m-plus deficit versus a $3.6m deficit in the prior year. By avoiding interest, depreciation and impairments in the PR puffery, it clouds the bigger picture.
3. For God’s Sake Show Some Vision (OK, this is less a guideline and more a personal view)
I got an email from an acquaintance this week with a subject headline reading: “Even Uzbekistan is getting a new stadium”
It’s bemusing but in reality it’s actually embarrassing.
Auckland is the only major city in Australasia not to have either built a new major sports stadium or significantly restructured one in the past 25 years.
Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington… even Townsville are already doing it or have done it.
For those reasons alone – let alone the false economics of continuing the funding of Eden Park and three other stadiums – we must run with a waterfront option.
Two of the three on the table are compelling (I am told the fanciful “Crater” below sea level Bledisloe Wharf venture is dead in the water with council as an option).
That leaves the long-running Quay Street campaign which last week issued a blizzard of beautiful renders and convincing narrative for its proposal, and the somewhat late-to-the-party but noteworthy Wynyard Point/Tank Farm bid.
It’s a pity that when the Quay Park option first began fermenting in 2017 with project lead, former Warriors CEO Jim Doyle, that the Tank Farm was not available for consideration due to the America’s Cup defence.
That’s changed now and early suggestions are that its bid, led here by former NZ Rugby Board member Richard Dellabarca can be delivered at a lower cost in a site that is arguably more iconic than the other end of the waterfront.
In some ways, it’s a pity those involved in both bids can’t combine forces and settle on the best site and outcome for the Auckland public.
South Island NRL bid to reveal Hollywood face in Las Vegas next month
While on stadia talk, the backers of the South Island bid to join the National Rugby League (NRL) will reveal more detail of the expansion campaign in Las Vegas when the competition hosts an historic double header at Allegiant Stadium – the same venue that just hosted the Super Bowl final.
The Sydney Roosters and Brisbane Broncos will square off with Russell Crowe’s South Sydney Rabbitohs and Manly Sea Eagles clashing in the other game on March 2.
Hollywood actor Crowe has been the face of the NRL video campaign trying to woo Americans to fill the iconic Vegas stadium.
In the ad, Crowe explains the basic rules of league to Americans. Lucky it wasn’t rugby or the ad would have been longer than Band of Brothers.
It will be intriguing to see how many Yanks turn out at the stunning Allegiant Stadium after the “it’s football but not as we know it” focus on the collision elements of rugby league.
South Island bid boss Tony Kidd confirmed to Sports Insider following last week’s exclusive on the 2026 expansion bid that he will be in Vegas for the double header and the consortium would use the opportunity to reveal more details.
That includes their own Hollywood factor by revealing the details on the “face of the bid” teased last week. The likes of Jason Momoa, Taika Waititi and Sam Neill have been touted as possibilities.
Kidd will also use the Vegas trip as an opportunity to woo potential American investors.
A-League content folly strategy is a warning for NZ Rugby and Silver Lake
‘We’re a football business, not a media business’: A-League bosses explain job cuts.
I read that headline with incredulity in the Sydney Morning Herald this week.
It was delivered by new A-League commissioner Nick Garcia (back to him in a minute) as an explanation as to why Australasia’s premier club football league was in dire trouble bleeding money and had sacked half of its 80 staff.
It’s hard to know where to start with the A-League debacle across the Tasman but let’s link a few things together that should raise acute red flags for sport on this side of the Ditch.
For starters (and Super Rugby sides pursuing a similar-styled commission should be careful what they wish for!), over-zealous club owners forced a split away from Football Australia in 2020 in the belief they could take the A-League to a new level.
The chief ringleaders were Melbourne City who are owned by the Abu Dhabi-owned City Football Group in which Silver Lake paid US$500m for a 14.5 per cent stake in 2019, since upped to over 18 per cent.
Who was working for City Football Group, owners of Manchester City, at the time? None other than Nick Garcia.
Football Australia warned club owners to be careful what they wished for, cut the A-League loose and are now flush with funds off the astounding success of the national women’s team, the Matildas.
In the meantime, in 2021 the ambitious A-League club owners negotiated a A$140 million sale of a 33 per cent stake to Silver Lake.
That cash injection has been scandalously squandered as this SMH investigation outlines.
Now the A-League faces a potential nightmare scenario of being forced to buy out its largest shareholder by 2029 which would require the sport to fund hundreds of millions of dollars or a secure new investor to survive.
Effectively, that has happened because the A-League made a ridiculous decision to invest in becoming a content company. It spent millions creating a digital and content arm caked KeepUp which featured content from domestic leagues to European leagues and national teams.
Presumably, it did this with the endorsement of Silver Lake.
KeepUp has been a spectacular disaster.
Garcia had the hide to pass off his former employer City Football Group’s own contribution to a revolution that blew up in the owners’ faces. But in reality, KeepUp was the brainchild of previous A-League CEO Danny Townsend.
He vacated his seat weeks before the full extent of the KeepUp folly was exposed and has somehow ended up with a plum job running Saudi Arabia’s notorious PIF sovereign wealth fund disrupting just about every professional sport.
American billionaire and new Auckland A-League franchise owner Bill Foley is the sort of new owner the A-League needs because he brings credibility (not to mention $25m in expansion license fees the league desperately needs). But he must be wondering what he’s got himself into.
In the meantime, it’s remiss if we don’t at least join the dots back to Silver Lake and its New Zealand Rugby investment.
The biggest noise we’ve heard from Silver Lake’s $200m investment in the national union (soon to be $262m) is the global content app NZR + which is designed to deliver All Blacks and NZR content to global fanbases (increasing revenue along the way).
If you think that sounds suspiciously similar to the A-League media venture, you’re not alone.
There are subtle differences between both, but by and large, it’s a content business strategy that is already showing signs of coming up short. New NZR ‘ComCo’ commercial boss Craig Fenton only needs to pick up the phone to any Kiwi media business owner to understand that.
Rebel Rebel, Your Life Is A Mess: Is Melbourne’s Super Rugby team dying?
Super Rugby hasn’t even kicked off yet and already there are worrying signs the Melbourne Rebels won’t last the season.
Sports pages across the Ditch are ablaze with negative headlines about the future of Victoria’s sole pro-rugby outpost, including revelations newly appointed Rugby Australia CEO Phil Waugh wanted to merge them with New Zealand Rugby-owned Moana Pasifika.
That came after the club went into voluntary administration. Now the Rebels CEO and 10 staff have been sacked with the coaches put on a four-month deal to cover the 2024 season.
The Rebels have just A$17,300 in the bank but A$20 million in debts.
The players haven’t been terminated because Rugby Australia is a party to their contracts.
But Waugh warns the money well is dry.
Just the sort of news the new Super Rugby Commission needs just as it tries to launch a shinier version of itself.
What Sports Insider will be watching and reading this weekend
Hail the King: There’s no stopping to the NFL juggernaut
There’s only one big story still dominating headlines this week – and that’s the Super Bowl.
America’s National Football League is now a never-before-seen behemoth in the sports broadcasting world. Super Bowl LVIII was the country’s biggest ever live audience with 123.4 million viewers on CBS alone.
Yes, the Taylor Swift effect helped with female viewership up 9 per cent and the highest on record.
But the juggernaut didn’t need the Swift-Travis Kelce romance to propel itself to new heights.
The NFL made up 93 of the top 100 TV broadcasts in the US in 2023.
Its recovery from the Covid pandemic has been breath-taking and has eclipsed any other professional sport as well as relegating the rest of America’s so-called Big Four Leagues (basketball’s NBA, baseball’s MLB, hockey’s NHL and football’s MLS) to a “shadow tier”.
Sport Reality TV Watch
Netflix has confirmed a third season of golf’s Full Swing, the Drive To Survive-styled fly-on-the-wall doco series.
Other than the odd episode, Full Swing has left me cold. I didn’t want to like the tennis version Break Point, but begrudgingly I admit season 2 isn’t bad.
But the Six Nations series Full Contact (honestly there’s a cottage industry in dreaming up these titles) is mindlessly dull and confirms my suspicion that rugby does not translate well to this genre.
Only Italy’s earthy Kiwi assistant coach Neil Barnes comes off as genuine (“I forgot the cameras were there”, he told Taranaki media). Apparently Italy’s Kiwi coaching staff of former All Black Kieran “Colt” Crowley and Barnes co-operated with Netflix. Others including Wales’ Kiwi boss Warren Gatland didn’t want a bar of it.
As for the still-to-be-produced latest season of the grand-daddy of them all, Drive to Survive, I wonder how much air-time will be given to one of its enduring stars and the unfortunate imbroglio Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has got himself into?
And is it just an unfortunate coincidence Horner is married to a former Spice Girl Gerri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell whose former bandmate Posh is wed to David Beckham whose recently dropped Netflix docuseries Beckham rehabilitated the couple’s image?
Reel of the Week
Young Australian surfer Molly Picklum is being tipped as a future world champion after becoming the first woman to score a perfect 10 at the Pipeline Masters in the revered Hawaiian surfing competition.
- Trevor McKewen is one of New Zealand’s most experienced journalists and sports business commentators, and a former Head of Sport for NZME. He has also held senior executive roles at NZ Rugby and the Warriors and holds a particular interest in the commercial side of sport. Now semi-retired, he writes the Sports Insider column weekly “to keep sports fans informed and administrators honest”.
