How to build a Bear: New NRL club hits market with $12m cheque – and a warning from Wayne Bennett

Wayne Bennett lost count of the broken promises.

The number of times a prospective Dolphins recruit would look him in the eye, sometimes even shake hands on a deal to become the club’s marquee signing, only to renege at the last minute.

“I can’t tell you the amount of guys that said they would come and then didn’t turn up because their [incumbent] clubs upped the offer,” Bennett recalls.

“They just used us up to get a better price. That’s OK, I don’t like that, but I understand that. They will have to get used to that.”

They are the Perth Bears. As of November 1, the new NRL franchise can enter the market for players. Handed a blank canvas and a blank cheque, the Bears are trying to build a competitive roster from scratch. They have just begun the process of selling the dream, a chance to become a trailblazer as rugby league expands into a new frontier.

No one understands the challenge better than Bennett. Not only was he the first coach of the Brisbane Broncos when they entered the competition in 1988, he was also the inaugural clipboard holder for the Dolphins when they joined 35 years later. Both clubs have become welcome additions to the NRL, but only after overcoming their own unique obstacles upon being handed a licence.

So what can the NRL’s newest club learn from them? If there’s one piece of advice Bennett has for the Bears, it is this: “It’s all about the people.”

“It’s the people that start the team,” Bennett explains. “I know what I’m talking about when I talk about the right people, but a lot of people don’t.

“Your coach, chief exec, chairman and board are really the keys. You don’t want someone weak-kneed at the board level, because the whole thing can go under and quickly lose momentum with what you’re trying to build.

“The other thing is, they have got to win. They just have to win. We won our first three of four games at the Dolphins and that set us on the path. If we lose those four games, it’s a whole different scenario. And at the Broncos, we won our first seven games.

“It took just the heat out of the whole buy-in with another team in the competition, all the stuff they can write stories about. They can’t write those stories if you win. You’ve got to win and you’ve got to win early. When I look at the clubs that have all come into the comp and not won early, they’ve all paid a huge price for that.

“What happens is the criticism comes in left, right and centre, it starts to pull the place down. The thing you need most is confidence and that’s what you lose.”

But first, the Bears need to assemble a competitive roster. The task has been handed to coach Mal Meninga and recruiter Dane Campbell, who are now selling the dream of living in, and representing, the state of Western Australia.

Some players will embrace the chance to be part of a bold new frontier, while others will expect a premium to shift to the other side of the country. It’s also a chance for their agents to cash in, using the Bears as leverage in negotiations with other parties.

That will create inflationary pressures, and the temptation to unveil a big name early in the piece.

“I wouldn’t allow the club to do that,” Rabbitohs coach Bennett says of his Dolphins days. “The managers want to give you all their shit players. If they can’t get the job done where they were, they can’t get the job done with you.

“All of a sudden you could have five or six players on your list that are of no value to you because you overreacted and panicked and threw money at something you shouldn’t be throwing money at. We lost a few players on that basis, but that was fine, we were happy to do that.”

Those sentiments were echoed by Dolphins chief executive Terry Reader.

‘The managers want to give you all their shit players. If they can’t get the job done where they were, they can’t get the job done with you.’

Wayne Bennett

“Half the names we supposedly missed out on, we didn’t even talk to,” Reader says. “It’s about having the nerve to not overpay or buy someone for the sake of it. We made sure we waited to get the right people, and we got Herbie Farnworth and Tom Flegler for the year after, whom we signed before we even kicked a ball.”

Another man who understands the importance of recruiting well early is John Ribot. The former Kangaroos winger has a long and storied career as an administrator, particularly when it comes to building sporting businesses from the ground up.

Ribot was the first chief executive of the Broncos and the Melbourne Storm, the chairman when Queensland Roar entered the A-League and the architect of the Super League competition.

“We were fortunate to get some big names to join in Brisbane and Victoria,” says Ribot, who oversaw a Broncos team that won its first five games, while the Storm won seven of their first eight matches.

“We had Wally Lewis, Greg Dowling, Gene Miles, Colin Scott, Greg Conescu, Bryan Niebling – I think we had eight or nine internationals that had a presence with the people [in Brisbane].

“Glenn Lazarus was a big plus for us, having the ‘Brick With Eyes’ in Victoria.

“That was part of a marketing campaign, we’d say ‘come and have a look at how big this guy is; he’s big, he’s mobile, he’s strong, he runs the ball up hard.’ It ticked a lot of boxes, [Victorian sports fans] educated themselves well.”

Then there’s the need to ensure that success is sustainable. The temptation will be to pay top dollar for the biggest names off contract, in the hope other quality footballers follow. But overspending early could result in an unbalanced roster, as well as salary cap headaches in the years to come.

In the Bears’ case, they must show budding West Australian players that there is a pathway for them to the NRL, while also tapping into the resources of the North Sydney Bears, their constituents almost 4000 kilometres away.

“I would strongly recommend they put time into the pathways,” Ribot suggests.

The Bears will have a presence in the NSW Cup via North Sydney, as well as in the Queensland Cup, most likely through Easts Tigers. Those pipelines, along with the juniors coming out of Perth, are where the majority of Bears players will come from in the decades to come.

For now, however, they must go to market and make the best use of the $11.95 million they have available to spend on 36 roster spots. Campbell has already spoken of a goal of securing 10 signatures by Christmas, just as free agents Payne Haas, Viliame Kikau, Jayden Campbell, Josh Addo-Carr, Harry Grant, Jahream Bula and Tyran Wishart hit the market.

Having spent more than a decade in similar recruiting roles at Melbourne and North Queensland, Campbell has seen first-hand the Storm’s strategy of investing a high percentage of the club’s salary cap into its spine players. Will the Bears do the same or seek a more balanced spend across its roster?

“You look at the top-four clubs this year – and I include Penrith in that … even their model is geared towards the spine,” Campbell says.

“They might lose an outside back like a Stephen Crichton or a Matt Burton over time and they will replace them with another exciting young talent like Jesse McLean or an Izack Tago.

“The Storm have gone down the route of getting their spine right and building blocks around that, which makes total sense.

“Then you’ve got the Broncos, who have two forward leaders and some very good spine players. The common denominator in all of that is that you invest in your spine, no doubt, and make sure you have a forward leader. Penrith had it for a long time in James Fisher-Harris and then Moses Leota and Isaah Yeo, they’ve always had three guys in the middle of the field.

“The Broncos have done it this year with Payne Haas and Patrick Carrigan. The Storm have done it forever and a day – back in their glory days Jesse Bromwich was the main man. The Raiders have a couple of dominant middle forwards in [Joseph] Tapine and [Josh] Papalii and have been able to build around that. They probably haven’t invested heavily into their spine, but they will because [Kaeo] Weekes and [Ethan] Strange will get the big bucks.

“Collectively, they wouldn’t be on anywhere near as much as the Penrith, Melbourne or Brisbane spines.”

Starting a franchise from scratch is an inexact science. There is no manual on how to build a Bear. For the Dolphins, after a series of high-profile knockbacks, Bennett saw value where others couldn’t. They weren’t superstars when they signed, but Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow and Isaiah Katoa have become just that.

Then there are the likes of Jeremy Marshall-King, Mark Nicholls and Kodi Nikorima. There was little to no interest in them from other clubs, but Bennett reckons they couldn’t have brought more on and off the field.

“It’s as much about that when you build a new club, you want good men there,” Bennett says.

Will the Bears be able to build something similar? Can they attract the right type of players, at the right price, to the other side of the country?

“We’ll know in two years,” Bennett says.