Sale Sharks co-owner makes major claim over future stadium

The revenue gap here is worth spelling out, because it is larger than the numbers suggest.

Bath at nine to ten million against Sale at two and a half is the headline, but Orange is comparing gross ticket revenue only. Sale then pays six per cent of that back to the landlord and takes nothing from food, beverage or parking. A club that owns its ground keeps all three, and the ancillary spend at a rugby match is typically substantial relative to the ticket price, because the crowd arrives early and stays late.

So the real gap is not four to one. On matchday contribution it is considerably worse.

The structural point underneath is that a tenant club cannot monetise its own audience. Every commercial lever available to a rugby club — hospitality boxes, naming rights, non-matchday events, retail, catering margin — requires control of the asset. Without it you are selling a product in someone else's shop and paying commission on your own customers.

Which is why the "five years away" line is the important part of the interview. Building a stadium is not an ambition, it is the only route to the revenue model everyone assumes these clubs already have.

Orange's remark that they would have walked away had they read the contract is unusually candid and worth noting. Rugby ownership has a long record of buyers who acquired a brand and a squad without examining what the brand actually controls. The playing asset is visible and the commercial rights are in an appendix.

One thing I would want to know, as someone who has been on the administrative side of clubs in France and England: what the lease term is. A club five years from a new ground with fifteen years left on the current lease has a very different problem from one with three years left, and that number determines whether this is a plan or an aspiration.