Quote: debaser "How so?'"
Lots of reasons. For one, if the club was worth anything at all then it could only be by way of sale as a going concern. As we have ourselves demonstrated very well, if you go tits, you ain't worth a carrot. For another, nobody buys rugby league clubs as a business with a view to making money. It is a good way of spending a large amount of money.
Where you may occasionally find buyers is for shares, if someone wants to sell enough to give the buyer control of the club. The buyer will pay whatever the kudos of being the new owner, and in control, is worth to them. It won't be based on some sort of objective "valuation". It wouldn't be a normal sale, as nobody could conceivably buy Bradford Bulls, or almost any other RL club, as a business proposition in the true sense with a view to making themselves a profit. Sports clubs, of any sort, are invariably just not that sort of business, and ownership seems to carry with it a fans' expectation and demand that anything you do happen to make in income must be spent, and then some, on "buying new players", and if you don't splash the cash then let's get someone else in who will.
The short answer has already been given. It's worth what someone would pay for it. Bearing in mind that the purchaser would be buying an ongoing concern with pretty high overheads that they would have to meet from day 1, and absolutely no guarantees of income. As, of course, did Omar. Before we went bust, Hood made it very clear that if a purchaser came along they would step aside. None ever did, so in that sense you could say that the value on the open market was Nil.
