The question of who you'd replace Penn is an irrelevant one as Penn, unfortunately, is not interested in selling his little money-maker. Apparently he's had approaches in the past to sell but he just brushed them off.
Ideally, i'd just want an owner who has at least something of an iota of passion for the club, like Uncle Nick and Rusty have vis-a-vis for the roosters and the a the rabbits.
This is a pretty sweet deal for Penn ( now , not initially ) , pretty much all the major costs are covered with the salary cap / footy department grant SO there is no real need to spend loads extra unless you are chasing huge success.
They now get , memberships , ticket sales , hospitality , ground advertising , food / booze royalties & merchandise, less of course the staffing costs to run all that, even so it would be a great little money earner.
So let’s say it’s worth 25 million to sell they’d possibly be getting a 10-12% return which you can’t get through most investments , so why would they want to sell ??
Live in New York , turn up occasionally , bank your return each year , it’s a really sweet deal.
AND, why would you want to invest say , 10 million a year more ( putting the thing into major loss ) to achieve greater success and make the fans happy ??? If your team gets into the finals , or makes a Grand Final you actually don’t get any of that revenue but you do make a **** load from merchandise ( but NOT 10 million).
Now , all of the above is supposition but a lot comes from discussions over the years with various CEO’s ( I always thought the club would share the gate takings for the finals games but no 100% goes to the NRL).
If we played a semi final at Brookie , they’d get the hospitality , food royalties etc but none of the gate.
This “ might “ have changed from when I was in “ the know “ but I doubt it.
So there you have our major issue.
And looking at it from purely an investment perspective the Penn’s are very very smart , if I was an investor I’d do exactly the same thing.
The only thing that would ever change this is if we were perennially winning wooden spoons and getting crowds of 6000 not 16,000, then and ONLY then would they have to do something different.
