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THE BUSINESS OF RUGBY LEAGUE: SOME SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS IN THE SYDNEY METROPOLITAN AREA 1908 - 1952 KRISTINE CORCORAN A thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts at the University of New South Wales in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts with Honours in History. 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments . page i Abbreviations .......................................... page ii Graphs, Tables, Diagrams . page iii Abstract . page iv INTRODUCTION ........................................ page 1 CHAPTER ONE - Creation and Growth ..................... page 15 CHAPTER TWO - Consolidation ........................... page 41 CHAPTER THREE - Expansion ............................ page 73 CONCLUSIONS ........................................ page 99 BIBLIOGRAPHY . page 106 APPENDIX 1 - Speech by H. R. Miller . page 115 APPENDIX 2 - Club Boundaries .......................... page 120 Acknowledgments The completion of this thesis was by no means a lone effort. Firstly, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Richard Cashman. His efforts, advice and support were most appreciated and without these my task would have been much more difficult. I would also like to thank the staff of the Mitchell Library, the Social Sciences and Humanities Library of the University of New South Wales and Gail Goodair and Judith Foster of the Information Resource Centre at Tourism New South Wales. I also owe thanks to the staff and management of the New South Wales Rugby Football League for making their records and time available. A very large thank you !o my friends and colleagues who provided support and encouragement throughout the research and writing of the thesis. In particular, I would like to thank the members of the Australian Society for Sports History and, more precisely, the late Tom Brock, the South Sydney Rugby Football League's Club historian, John O'Hara, Phil Mosely and many others too numerous to mention who were there at the beginning and at the end. Closer to home I would like to thank my husband, Peter Corcoran OAM, for his unswerving support and unending supply of information and encouragement. Without him I may never have completed this thesis and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. A very big thank you to my parents Margaret and Bill Little who also provided much support and encouragement. Abbreviations ANU Australian National University ARL Australian Rugby Football League CRL Country Rugby League of New South Wales NSW New South Wales NSWRFL New South Wales Rugby Football League NSWRA New South Wales Rowing Association PSAA Public Schoois Amateur Athletics Association QRL Queensland Rugby League RSSS Research School of Social Sciences RFL Rugby Football League VFA Victorian Football Association VFL Victorian Football Leugue £ pounds £/s/d pounds/shillings/pence ii Graphs, Tables and Diagrams Graphs Graph 3.1 Total NSWRFL Receipts - Actual and Trend . page 75 Tables Table 1.1 NSWRFL Gate Receipts and Expenditure . page 23 Table 1.2 Sydney Premiership Competition Crowd Sizes . page 25 Table 1.3 Teams in the Sydney Premiership Competition ......... page 26 Table 1.4 Percentage of Gate Receipts Paid to Clubs ........... page 32 Table 2.1 Sydney premiership Crowd Sizes . page 44 Table 2.2 NSWRFL Gate Receipts and Payments to Clubs ....... page 49 Table 2.3 Major Items of Income and Expenditure .............. page 57 Table 2.4 Player Payments ............................... page 64 Table 3.1 NSWRFL Total Income and Crowd Sizes ............. page 80 Table 3.2 Distribution of Sydney Premiership Competition Gate Receipts ............................... page 81 Table 3.3 Major Items of Income and Expenditure . page 87 Table 3.4 Player Payments .............................. page 92 Diagrams Diagrams 3.1 Metropolitan Expansion of Sydney . page 77 iii Abstract This thesis provides an analysis of the establishment and growth of rugby league in the Sydney metropolitan area from 1908 to 1952. In particular, it examines the extent to which rugby league in this period can be considered to be a business. It seeks to determine whether there has always been a business aspect to the sport of rugby league and how rugby league in Sydney developed to the stage where the Sydney Premiership Competition could be called a product. The period under consideration covers the establishment and growth of the code in Sydney from its inception to the advent of licensed Leagues clubs, at which time the funding basis of rugby league football clubs was altered. This, in turn affecting the power relationships between administrators, players and spectators. This thesis concludes that rugby league in the Sydney metropolitan area axisted as both a sport and a business. The Sydney Premiership Competition can be viewed both as a product and as a sporting competition. Some of the men in charge of the game of rugby league, particularly those operating at league level in the Head Office, were oriented towards the business aspects of the game, while others, particularly those operating at the club level were more concerned with the sporting components of the game. The focus of the Sydney Premiership Competition has, for some administrators, always been on the business end of the game. The New South Wales Rugby Football League (NSWRFL) has relied on a share of receipts from the Sydney Premiership Competition along with profits from representative matches to earn its income, and maximising that income for the growth of the league has been its driving force. Alternatively, the clubs which constituted the league were driven by the desire to win, which they believed would attract crowds and ultimately ensure the survival of their clubs. To determine the nature and extent of the business element in rugby league, the NSWRFL, the clubs and the Sydney Premiership Competition are analysed in terms of cartel theory. In addition, the effect upon the game and the Sydney Premiership Competition of war and economic depression are iv investigated. From the analysis it is argued that, at league level rugby league exhibited cartel-type behaviour while at club level administration was more driven by utility maximisation rather than profit maximising. V INTRODUCTION 'Sport is too much a game to be a business and too much a business to be a game'. 1 This quotation aptly describes rugby league as we know it today. The reality behind this quotation was brought home only too vividly to observers of rugby league, when, in October 1994 Rupert Murdoch unveiled his plans for a 'Super League', which was to provide a sporting 'product' for his worldwide pay television operations. Opponents of Murdoch's plans argued that while rugby league could become more business-like and an improved sporting product this should not be at the expense of rugby league as a sport with its associated traditions. 2 However, that response. may have overlooked the possibility that rugby league may have been a saleable 'product' for some time and that tradition may have outlived its usefulness unless it was adapted and adaptable enough to cope with the business elements of the sport. This thesis will examine the possibility that rugby league was a saleable product and had been for some time and that business practices had been applied to the sport, at least at league level in the past, which in turn predisposed the game to the overtures of Supe; League. These possibilities will be explored through analysis of rugby league in the Sydney Metropolitan area. Previous writing on New South Wales and Australian rugby league To date, the history of rugby league, both in New South Wales and Australia, more generally, has been written primarily from two perspectives. Most past and current literature relating to rugby league has been written from the heroic perspective and provides limited social history and economic analysis. More common is the work written from a 'popular' history point of view in the form of chronologies or directories of events (including club histories), or from a players' viewpoint in the form of biographies and autobiographies.3 Works by journalists including Terry Williams,4 Ian Heads, 5 and Gary Lester6 fall into this category. The second perspective applied to rugby league is statistical, namely who won what, when and where. 7 Success in rugby league,· for some, is measured in the simple terms of win, lose or draw (rather than by the bottom line 1 of profit). There has been limited, and mostly academic, interest in relating rugby league to its social and economic context, and even less consideration of the business aspects of rugby league in New South Wales in particular. Academic writing on rugby league in Australia and New South Wales has included articles and books by authors such as Chris Cunneen,8 Andrew Moore,9 Maree Murray, 10 Max and Reet Howell, 11 Murray Phillips, 12 Brett Hutchins13 and such works as a detailed study of the St. George club by Parsons. 14 Few of these have touched upon the business aspects of rugby league. Andrew Moore's recently published work on the North Sydney District Rugby League Football Club15 was a marked departure from earlier rugby league writing, in that it deliberately set out to be a social history of the club and the area which it served. For the first time questions were asked, and answered, about how the game affected the North Sydney community and how the society of the area affected the club. The book also included some particular economic analysis in the area of the role of the leagues club and its relationship to the football club, an aspect which is outside the scope of this thesis. However, the business of rugby league was not the central focus of Moore's book. Braham Dabscheck 16 has focused his analysis of sport on industrial relations and has included rugby league in his list of sports studied. He has explored the impact of issues such as salary caps and draft systems which have been designed to distribute players more evenly across a competition.

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