Taranaki union set to join the Chiefs for 2014

It is looking increasingly like the Chiefs will be partly owned by the Taranaki Rugby Union among others next season as part of a bid to pump more capital into the champion franchise. And if that happens some home games will have to be played in New Plymouth from now on. Chiefs chairman Dallas Fisher is heading a working party that has been putting together a proposal involving provincial unions within the Chiefs region, the Taranaki union and private investors for months now and said good progress was being made. Such a bid by a consortium, which has yet to go to the New Zealand Rugby Union with a firm proposal, would follow similar arrangements that saw the Hurricanes and Blues both given the green light by the NZRU for joint ownership of their operating licences by a mix of provincial union and private investors and the Crusaders granted a wholly rugby-owned licence but with a private guarantor. Under such arrangements the NZRU still pays the players out of TV rights money distributed by Sanzar but the licence-holders run everything else and are free to market the team to increase their financial return and organise third-party deals to sweeten players' contracts. While the NZRU had earlier nominated a September 1 date to have the Chiefs' bid presented to them, it seems that was not a hard and fast deadline and the Chiefs' working party is still making presentations to potential investors to get the final dollar amounts committed. "We're heading in the right direction but we're still working on it," Fisher said. "It's all going to be sorted within a month. We've been taking deliberate steps towards this and at the moment we've got certain approvals but you're not going to get your final approval till you get your final dollar committed." All the processes needed to stitch the overall deal together took time, he said. It appears the provincial unions are on board but further work is still needed on the licence application and completing the private investement component of the commercial package. The Chiefs need the extra investment in order to press ahead with ambitious plans they have for their Ruakura training base and to compete for big-name players on the New Zealand market, while investors need a deal that provides an opportunity for financial return on that investment. Currently the Chiefs are run by a board representing a trust made up of the provincial unions in the franchise region and must return all profits to those unions.  They then rely on those unions voluntarily returning those profits for any reinvestment in the team. It would seem the price to pay for the Taranaki union and possibly some Taranaki investors putting their money into the Chiefs is to ship up to two home games to Taranaki's 23,000-seat Yarrow Stadium each season. Waikato Stadium, which holds just over 25,000 spectators, currently hosts six home games a season plus playoffs and anything beyond that has proved hard to sell to a saturated market. There are no other suitable venues in the franchise region with only 2000 covered seats at Pukekohe, Mt Maunganui's Baypark Stadium a specialist speedway stadium with a race track around the outside of the playing field that has a poor playing surface that is continually cut up by stockcars and Rotorua's International Stadium has good facilities and playing surface but struggles to attract big crowds. The last two seasons have seen Pukekohe and Baypark each host a game, although the Chiefs were disappointed when only 12,000 turned up to the latter venue last Easter for the plum local derby between the Chiefs and the Blues. It now remains to be seen which venues will lose games to New Plymouth if Taranaki Rugby Union is part of the ownership group that finally gets granted the Chiefs' licence.