Clearly the key thing for clubs is ownership of their stadium and facilities, and ownership of the revenues that are generated from it.

That was the key thing in the business plan when building Langtree Park, and there are now regular events, conferences and weddings in the stadium - which just wasn't possible at Knowsley Road.

Saints also now manage and own all the catering in the stadium, rather than outsourcing it.

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.