This. It's where many RL clubs falter. It's why I get so annoyed at the often rose-tinted view of the sport 20-30 years ago. It's that time period where clubs decided to not invest in their stadiums and led to the current situation where half the league don't own their stadiums or have suffered with terribly outdated ones for far too long. They were either sold off or allowed to wither away with the money going into the first team instead.

Off the top of my head -

Owned by club:
Leeds
Saints
Warrington
Castleford

Not owned but virtually same as:
Hull KR
Catalans

Not owned:
Wakefield
Hull FC
Huddersfield
Wigan
Salford
Widnes

Now before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, there are obviously variances in how well some clubs do out of their situation. For instance whilst Cas own their ground they struggle to maintain it whilst Wigan do well out of being at the DW. And there are others too.

However, the ideal is to be like a Leeds, Saints or Wire in my opinion (Cas will hopefully get there with their new stadium). Because, despite some clubs doing ok not owning their ground, it still restricts them.
Leeds, Saints or Wire can do what they want with their stadiums and get all the income from it. And, crucially, borrow against it if they need to.
Leeds will be doing the North Stand sometime soon and despite having a couple of million in the bank will obviously need to borrow to fund it. Since Leeds own millions in assets it's not a problem. So can invest to provide higher income in the future, like they did with the Hotel and Carnegie Stand.

That's what we should aim for. Playing in a nicer stadium is fine for the short to medium term but it still restricts you long term.

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.