There is already a hotel at Headingley (the east stand of the cricket stadium) and it the club does very well out of it (both for hotel occupancy and for conferencing / weddings etc). However, Leeds' circumstances are somewhat different to the other clubs in SL.

The main motivation for Leeds to develop the cricket stadium with the hotel (until they sold it circa 200icon_cool.gif was to retain Headingley's Test venue status. One England test generates about as much in catering and hospitality revenue as a full season of RL (at least, that was the claim floating around). That makes the case for return on investment much more compelling.

Even without the revenue generated by Test cricket, I suspect that the conference and events market in Leeds is somewhat more buoyant that the one in Widnes or Wakefield.

Let's also not forget that there was more than a hint of opportunism from Wasps. At the time Wasps bought themselves into the Ricoh, it was in danger of becoming a huge white elephant; the stadium's primary tenant hadn't played there for more than 12 months and it was losing money hand over fist. We aren't dealing with a local council and a botched S106 here, we're talking about a loss-making venue whose owners were probably more than happy to get whatever they could.

That said, I do agree that we every club needs to be generating more revenue beyond TV and match day income.

I don't know anything about the Wasps deal save what I've read, but the comment that if all is as it appears to be, then the deal will have cost an arm and a leg is indisputably true. So their gates have initially gone up. So what? The main questions you would need to be able to answer are:
1. What does it cost to service the investment/borrowing? because those charges need to be paid before there is any surplus.
2. Who put up the money? Because if there is a profit at the end of the day then the "investors" will want it. Unless there is a billionaire who is happy to lose many millions a year, permanently, just cos he likes Wasps.

If there really is that much money to be made from casinos, hotels, Zumba nights or whatever at the Ricoh then how come no shrewd billionaires or other companies national or international were remotely interested prior to the Wasps deal? Yet there is, apparently, not only enough money to be made to service the acquisition finance and running costs, turn a healthy profit for investors, but also to make Wasps a wealthy rugby club out of presumably the small change.

I'm not remotely buying into this hype. It is all spin. I don't blame Wasps as a club for taking advantage of it but there are no lessons to be learned here.

Presumably the leisure bond issue is a way of getting some or all of the cash back to those who funded the purchase ASAP. All it then does however is pass the servicing of the bonds on to the next generation of people in charge of the club, who are faced with making sufficient money to be able to pay the return to investors.

Course, there's a cynical view to be taken here. Leisure bonds don't - AFAIK - have any cover under the FSCS. So if you sink your money into one and Wasps are unable to pay a return on it, you've got no compensation in the way you would have if you'd kept that money in your bank account and your bank had gone bust. So a couple of years down the line what's to stop Wasps running themselves into the ground, liquidating, phoenixing under a different company structure/directors and the bond holders ending up with nothing?

I'm tempted to say it shows you can polish turd. But that would be infantile & show my jealousy of yawnion crowds.