By GEOFF STEVENSON
Foreign Buyers needed in NRL
On Tuesday Chinese millionaire Martin Lee completed the usual ‘due diligence’ process and purchase the Newcastle Jets A-League team. Lee, and a couple of other consortiums of wealthy businessmen, had been looking at the Jets for a while and have seemingly liked what they saw. Lee has made his millions as a LED lighting manufacturer and also owns a couple of soccer teams in China as well as sponsoring two league divisions in China and one, curiously, in Portugal. Lee has money, and unlike a former Jets owner, has plans in place to continue to make money.
Meanwhile on the other end of town, the Knights have also been sans an owner and have, up until this point, had very few interested parties travel to the Hunter to kick tyres and take the popular team for a lap around the block. In fact, if the rumours are true, no one has made any serious attempt to court the NRL to purchase the Knights, and the only interested parties have been local businessmen and, to a lesser degree, the local Wests League Club. Either way none of these parties have showed a fleeting interest and none have the disposable funds of, say… Martin Lee.
On paper this is an absurd prospect. With no disrespect to the A-League or the Jets, the have always lived in the shadow of the Knights in the Hunter in every possible way. In fact in the past decade the Jets have nearly shut down on two or three occasions, something the NRL and the people of the Hunter would never allow of their beloved Knights.
The Knights have around 30% higher crowd average than the Jets, more media coverage and will soon enjoy funding from the NRL that will almost cover their operating budget. Yet the Jets ownership transition has been a matter of selecting Lee out from the other suitors.
Tellingly Lee has absolutely no links the Hunter and I’d assume would care little about ‘F3 Derbies’, or the prospects of the Lambton Jaffas in the local league.
So what’s the Jets, and the A-League for that matter, have that the Knights and the NRL doesn’t? If the rumour are true Lee wants to buy the Jets so he has an in on the lucrative Asian Champions League. And while the prize money involved would be handy as Lee continues to fund the loss making Jets (teams get around $250,000 just to make the semi-finals), it is the glory of owning a team in such a prestigious competition that apparently has Lee excited.
And, at the moment, this is something the NRL cannot replicate.
The current pool of foreign investment in sport is highly lucrative, just look at the Middle Eastern, Indian, Russian and Asian billionaires bankrolling the most successful soccer clubs in Europe (even supposed ‘battlers’ Leicester City are owned by a Thai businessman worth $3.1 billion). But soccer is the ‘World Game’, envied to some degree by all sports.
