I agree we are way behind others in professional offerings and income generated but we must add some context to some of these figures as the French league money is divided 14 ways and then from memory 30% provided to lower leagues, the English league divided by 10, etc. our small amount only gets divided by only a handful of teams.
It why I get frustrated when people try and compared t14 salary cap to NRL when NRL salary cap only split between 30 players and some t14 clubs have 55+ players on the books.
Context doesn't change much, they still blow us out of the water:
Top 14: ($188 million * 70% )/14 = $9.4 million
Gallagher: $213 million/10 = $21.3 million
URC comes much closer to our $6 million per team ($106million/16 = 6.625) but that's ignoring what these teams get from the Heineken cup and the fact that each of these nations have seperate broadcast revenue for tests as mentioned above. Our $30 million has to feed 5 super teams and the Wallabies. Even the New Zealand comparison is stark - I believe they distribute around 8 or 9 million to each of their super sides, leaving something like half their broadcast deal to fund the rest of the game.
The only advantage we have in all this is we own the entirety of our game and don't have to split any revenue with private equity, but for all those other teams and competitions that do that's more of a future issue than a current one.
