Well Newcastle has the best junior programme in Rugby League at the moment.

They have always had one of the best junior nurseries, but since privatisation, as part of the deal, the junior budget has been increased by over a million dollars a year. Newcastle are currently the under 16s national title holders, semi finalists at under 18s level, and are currently leading the under 20 National Youth Cup competition.

There is certainly room for some of your best 18 to 20 year olds to spend a year or two in the best resourced junior programme in the world, with fulltime coaches, trainers and the best gym facilities etc.



At the senior level, spending on the football programme over the last 3 years has increased to be 3 million a year higher than the average spent by NRL clubs. Head trainer Jeremy Hickmans is considered the best in Rugby League, and facilities are state of the art. In the last off season Istyn Harris spent time at Newcastle shadowing the Newcastle coaching team to see what the state of the art programme looks like. It's hard to know what resources could be shared, but I could see some of your support staff doing time at Newcastle and visa versa.



I can also see some senior players moving to Salford on loan. You can have Dobson right now - we have good young halves who could cover for him and have future firstgrade potential. Newcastle moves on about 4 or 5 young players a year because we produce too many players to use ourselves. Maybe Salford could use a few.

Sounds very impressive which makes my next question even more pertinent...



What would Newcastle be getting out of the deal?



Except, maybe, financial security from MK, on the playing side of things it would only ever be one way. I can see the benefits from an off-field point of view where knowledge and experience can be shared to everyone's benefit. Don't get me wrong, I'd love a close partnership with an NRL Club I'm just struggling to see where Newcastle would benefit.

Well you already said it.

Financial security.

Most clubs in Australia have licenced clubs, or giant poker machine palaces, backing them and covering any loses they make.

Newcastle started in 1988 with zero assets and relied for over 20 years on balancing the books with only football related revenue, which meant they were always in the bottom 2 or 3 clubs when it came to budget for football operations. Our two premierships came from the outstanding quality of our local juniors (thankyou Andrew Johns etc).

Three years ago a local guy who had made a tidy billion dollars before he turned 40 by riding on the coal price boom offered to buy and fund the club, which he did by putting in 20 million of his own money over three years, but the crash in the coal price and his habit of spending money like it is going out of fashion basically wiped him out (speculation is he is worth between 30 and 300 mill now), and he has handed back the licence, along with 5 mill to keep us going.

Anyway, we either go back to spending far less than other clubs, or find a new owner and keep spending as much as the top 2 or 3 clubs.



So far we have got bugger all for all the money spent, except for all the best staff and facilities possible.

You answered your own question, financial security. I’m just unsure whether the Novacastrians would be happy with further private investment after what happened with Nathan Tinkler. Also, the NRL is a different ball game to the Super League it would be interesting to see whether Marwan has the capital available to him to go in, strengthen the Knights and make them successful again.

I hate the word synergy. I've nowt else to add, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

Yeah, it's one of the millions of dog turd business words that have infected our everyday language.

I think it’s a perfectly crumulent word.

It's a medical word - or more correctly - a scientific word - referring to the way different parts of the body work together.

Like many medical words, it also has colloquial usage.

I know, it's just one of those words that's been adopted by 'Business' and is thrown about Powerpoint presentations the world over.

In a business context, synergy is the idea that 2+2 = 5. It is used quite a lot when mergers/acquisitions are taking place.

Bit of a heads up here for you going forward, but the word you're trying to leverage in is actually cromulent.

I refrained from making comment for this reason as 'Crumulent' means something else entirely. I was wondering if he was taking a sideways swipe at me being FOS.