And keep pissing up a tree in VIC. Great. For what, a couple of thousand fans? That is literally what it is. Let's not kid ourselves. The Rugby horse didn't bolt out of Melbounre, it never really visited (sorry Rebel fans but you are like the last outpost in a city of giants.) Chasing an unattainable dream in that city. Just seems to make more sense to invest in a Perth team and actually give it a chance to succeed.
If the Brumbies get yanked I will join the march on North Sydney HQ. It's a block away from me. It will make no farken sense whatsoever. The Force squad are three or four top notch players away from knocking people over more regularly. The Rebels are on the moon.
Blue - like it or not, the issue of Rebels preservation or otherwise has become not one of fan viability but more likely one of high cost exposure should the ARU have to close them down.
Remarkably, as the rugby fan I am, what has leaked out in recent days is that it appears that what the ARU then billed as a 'private equity buy out' when Cox's company 'bought out' the Rebels from the ARU was in fact no such thing but rather a form of cost sharing and delegated business responsibility (to Cox's company) for a period and that the ARU still guaranteed or underwrote large-scale Melbourne-based exposures to facilities, leases, stadium commitments and so on if the Rebels were closed down and/or Cox's company somehow pulled out.
If true, that is not a private equity buy-out at all, it's more a kind of one-sided joint venture with the ARU taking the vast majority of the significant still-existing franchise survival risk. As has been noted above in this thread, the ARU continues to provide very material $ subsidies to Cox's firm way above the base level of annual $ grants each franchise gets in any event from the ARU. This worrying and risky (given the ARU's already parlous overall cash position) truth also only leaked out well after the 'private equity buy out' deal was proudly announced.
This is why so tellingly Cox has recently more or less said that closing the Rebels down would cost the ARU a motza and they'd not do it for that reason alone - namely, they couldn't afford it.
I don't mean to offend Rebels fans as I have a lot of regard for their passion and loyalty, but the Rebels to date (after 6 seasons) have been a financial and performance disaster for the ARU and it's clearly not over yet.
This outcome is entirely of the ARU's own making. Yet again they indulged their intellectually and professionally lazy, poorly-researched 'national footprint' vision in thinking that as they expanded the quantity of Super rugby played, the quality of the sporting product so provided would just automatically take care of itself and the ARU needed to place no new effort into balancing quantity expansion with quality upgrades to the actual coaching, playing and management system that would have to deliver the new quantity of Super games and Super players.
Namely, the ARU, just as they did with the Force in 2006 and later, pursued a strategy of national quantitative growth totally bereft of execution quality, planning and detail, i.e., without real substance.
That chronic imbalance always contains massive hidden risk that ultimately explodes into a calamitous debacle dragging to disaster all who sailed in a ship in effect designed only for appearances, not high seas and long journeys.