In that time the Rebels extra TV market have been a significant factor ensuring that the ARU was betting $5M per year for TV rights on a per team pro rata basis, and increasing to $8M per year now.
Without the Rebels that's 16 less games per season.
And it's not exactly above normal special support. The Reds and Waratahs have both received financial support from the ARU in the past, the only difference is they have had 100 years to cement the code in their regions.
Make no mistake, the ARU haven't given the Rebels "special support". They have made an investment in the future of Australian rugby.
I'm not going to argue now about whether the ARU $s provided to the Rebels are 'good investing' or not. That's a moderately complex subject and in part the truth of it all rests in the immediate future years for that team. The Force (for example) had really good crowds in their early years and a peak in the S14 in 2009 (IIRC) but have seen their crowds, sponsorship and w-l% all decline markedly (or not improve at all) since their early years.
However, the nearly $9m lent to the Rebels for 2013 and 2014, and with another $2.5m pencilled in for 2015, is special support. These were special large loans to the Rebels that have been essentially written off given 'uncertainty of recovery' (see ARU Annual Report 2014, inter alia Notes 7 and 17 the ARU Accounts).
To the best of my knowledge, aside from the normal annual grants that all franchises get from the ARU, no additional special loan sums approaching c.$11m (to just one franchise) have been made to other individual franchises. The loan sums provided to the Tahs in c.2000 and c.2009 to the Reds were to avert bankruptcy essentially and I am reasonably sure both have been fully repaid. It looks highly unlikely the $11m to the Rebels will be repaid. The Rebels will have to be taken over by new funders soon, or they may face termination (but rumour has it that they v soon will be taken over, which is great news for the code as a whole, partly for the reasons I note below).
These large loans to the Rebels have been made at a time when the ARU is making large losses and where its cash liquidity has been declining rapidly and alarmingly. To provide $11m to the Rebels has of course meant that many other good rugby causes have had to go unmet or be degraded. My point solely was: the large - I would argue unprecedented - financial support to the Rebels has surely had negative consequences elsewhere for other teams or programs or the grassroots generally. And in that 'elsewhere' the code is markedly suffering and declining - e.g., just look at Fox viewership levels and recent Test match attendance levels.
Re the ARU S18 TV rights income boost that has been leaked for 2016 +. Let's see when the detail comes out, but I think you will find that the greatest component of the assumed 2016 + increase will come from not from having 5 Aus S18 teams, or even just more $s for these Aus 5, but principally from all of (a) the S18 expansion into Argentina and Japan (b) the massive GBP increases bid for the UK TV rights to S18 and (c ) the favourable AUD-USD forex position as the deals are struck in USD.
