WILL CAIRNS SEE MORE OF COWBOYS?

QThere’s little chance the Cowboys will bring a regular season fixture to Cairns due to details in the club’s agreement to play at North Queensland Stadium. Director of football Peter Parr also mentioned a lack of corporate facilities up here. With no NRL fixtures likely, what are the club’s plans around continuing to bring trial games to Cairns in the future?

AI can’t speak on behalf of other clubs and I know other clubs take a number of their home games to other venues, but I can speak about our financial and engagement model. It’d be fair to say in and around 80 per cent of the revenue for the club actually comes from people investing in the full season, being 12 home games, whether that investment is for membership, or for corporate facilities or for sponsorship and all the benefits that come with that, such as signage, corporate facilities, community engagement or whatever it may be. Other clubs may not be in the position where they have that revenue stream for the season and they rely on those single-game revenue streams. It’s very easy for those sorts of clubs, from an economic and a return-oninvestment viewpoint, to pick up a game and take it somewhere else, because they haven’t got that investment where they’re taking the game from in the first place. And, just to clarify Peter’s comment about corporate facilities, if we were to take a home game on the road, we have over 2500 corporate seats at our new stadium and 80 per cent of those are sold out on a season basis. What do we do with those 2000-plus seats? How do we fulfil the obligations of those people that have invested in it? We’ve had questions about how could the Rabbitohs do what they did (bring games to Cairns)? Well, the Rabbits did that in conjunction with the Queensland Government and Tourism and Events Queensland where there was a commercial package that was all part of that. It’s not through lack of want, it’s through the way the structure is set up to ensure – and this is something that I talk to our staff about and I talk about it until I’m blue in the face – that this club is sustainable for North Queensland, because that’s our responsibility. We work on two pillars, we work on what we do within our communities, the engagement we have – we’re part of the social fabric. But, from the gross regional product of North Queensland, the Cowboys contribute $200 million on an annual basis and we take that responsibility really seriously. We need to ensure that we’re here and that we’re putting a model in place that continues to evolve to be able to move with modern day sport, yet also be sustainable into the future. That being said, we will continue the model of playing our home trial games in North Queensland, where we flip between the regions of Mackay and Cairns on a yearly basis. We’re not saying Cairns wouldn’t be able to give us that investment, but it’s just to give you an idea of the decision we’d need to make and the economics behind it to be able to make that happen.