Warriors in foreign ownership
The Warriors are to be sold to a consortium led by Hawaiian businessman-politician Richard Fale.
By his own admission, the new owners don’t, collectively, know a lot about rugby league. You might think that would be a minimum requirement. Some would go further and argue that the same could be said for having skin in New Zealand as a society.
But perhaps we should pause before getting too emphatically them-and-us in our thinking.
Fale’s Hawaii, like New Zealand, is a place where Polynesians are a minority in their homeland and his consortium features current and former National Football League (NFL) players.
It may simply have been a negotiating tactic, but during the stormier parts of the negotiations to buy the Warriors from Eric Watson – and there were a few – he bridled at what he portrayed as the disrespectful way the buyers were being treated as ‘‘a bunch of wealthy brown athletes’’ bigger on sporting talent than business knowhow, whom the Warriors’ vendors felt they could treat as they wished.
It’s unlikely that the message that accompanied that complaint, getting a tad close to the race card, was accidental, though this wouldn’t in itself mean it was insincere. The changes Fale has signalled to be part of his agenda are transformational towards the United States model.
He talks about lifting the experience of attending a Warriors game to those of US football, basketball and baseball games.
Fale also acknowledges the importance of existing connections with the sport at national level. Clearly that’s a statement to be expected from any new owner, albeit one rendered all the more delicate if not difficult by the fact that his consortium beat out Auckland Rugby League’s own efforts to acquire the Warriors, having previously considered partnering up with them in ways that quickly fell apart, and not without rancour.
Such is the extent of Fale’s ambition, and perhaps his financial resources, that he is simultaneously interested in a bid for a Super Rugby franchise, based in Hawaii. He maintains his group still has the resources to pursue this, atop the Warriors purchase.
It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the purchase has been essentially agreed, though not yet formalised, at a time when the Warriors have started their season in fine form. The sale price is reported to be in the order of $24 million. It’s perhaps not strictly relevant, but let’s remind ourselves that the threshold for Overseas Investment Office scrutiny is business assets worth $100m. But it would be foolish to conclude that the Warriors ownership is a small-potatoes matter in the New Zealand scheme of things.