They like to play this game at the foot of the mountains.
An exercise, if you will, where they consider what happens if someone from marketing ever packs up their projector and powerpoint slides and walks out of the Panthers Academy.
Kind of like an office version of NRL Fantasy.
“We do it a lot with commercial staff because there’s a lot of turnover,” Penrith chief executive Matt Cameron tells this masthead.
“We go, ‘All right, well, if that person wasn’t here next week, does another person automatically go in there, or is it an outside recruit?’”
According to the man who has presided over their run of four straight titles, the same principle applies to navigating the talent equaliser that is the NRL salary cap.
FINDING A SOLUTION
It was just a few weeks ago when the club was approached about releasing the versatile Trent Toelau from the final year of his deal to return to Melbourne.
Toelau, who can fill in at halfback, five-eighth and hooker, had played 14 games since making his debut in 2024, and was considered a potential No.14 next year.
“He was pigeonholed as this player being able to solve these problems for us. Is there a logical replacement in the list, ready to go straight into that spot?” Cameron said.
“There wasn’t. So we were reluctant to let him go until we secured another solution to the problem from outside the club.”
That man was Warriors hooker Freddie Lussick, and the dominoes fell quickly.
“That changed our view after that,” he said.
IN THE ROOM
When Cameron says “our view”, there are at least six people in the room, including head coach Ivan Cleary and his two assistant coaches, Peter Wallace and Ben Harden.
Wallace, who played over 100 games for the Panthers, has been by Cleary’s side for the past three years, while Harden steps up following the departure of Ben Gardiner to the Perth Bears.
Harden has been involved in the Penrith system for over a decade, having first started as an assistant coach in their SG Ball (under-18s) side in 2013.
Panthers DNA is seemingly a prerequisite to be in the room.
The club’s pathways coach, Jono Rolfe, who is close to cracking 10 years since his days as coach at renowned league nursery Patrician Brothers Blacktown, is also present.
There’s general manager of football, Shane Elford, who, like Wallace, made his debut in the licorice allsorts in 1998, and went on to play 89 games for them over eight seasons.
He was immediately appointed the club’s welfare and education manager after retiring in 2010, and watched thousands of prospects come through the club’s sharehouse.
The final vote goes to club legend Greg Alexander, captain of their maiden premiership team and former Kangaroos and NSW Origin representative.
However the three biggest voices belong to Cleary, Elford, and Cameron.
“The way I explain it: Ivan’s about winning this week, Shane’s about winning this year, and my role is to win three years from now,” Cameron says.
“It’s a pretty good conversation, pretty robust. I’m trying to find the middle ground to those three conversations, and a big part of it is providing scenarios to all the coaching staff.
“If you look at us over the last couple of years, ‘If you want to do this, we’re going to lose Api (Koroisau) and (Viliame) Kikau’.
“’If you want this, we’re going to lose (Matt) Burton and (Stephen) Crichton. If you want to do this, we’re going to lose Jarome (Luai), and so on.”
AND ANOTHER ONE
The decision to release Jack Attard was the latest in a growing line of talented fullbacks to depart, from Liam Ison (Cronulla), Isaiah Iongi (Parramatta) and Daine Laurie (Canberra).
It was just a bit over a month ago when the club was in talks to extend the prodigious 19-year-old fullback, who had represented the Australian Schoolboys in 2024.
The Panthers had been before, with Liam Ison, who is now the back-up No.1 at Cronulla, and Isaiah Iongi, who just got a mammoth five-year deal for the same spot at Parramatta.
Daine Laurie also just left for a shot in Canberra.
And, like Attard, they all saw the giant-sized roadblock that was in front of them.
“The reality is, yeah, Dylan (Edwards) is contracted until 2028,” Cameron said.
Yet Penrith still baulked when Attard’s manager raised the idea of a release to join the Wests Tigers, and hoped the youngster would continue his path up the ranks.
“We felt he should play the 2026 season, and we still might have been in a position where we could do an extension for Jack,” Cameron said.
“But the reality was, I think everyone can see, even if we wanted to extend him, our offer would’ve been nowhere near what rival clubs have imposed.
“So we spoke to the manager and we let him go under the condition that the contract that he was going onto was far superior than what we could offer in the 2026 season, which it was.
“So reluctantly we let him go.”
PAY DAYS
The roll call of premiership-winning stars to depart during their dynasty is well-documented. A recent deep dive into a rise in Panthers juniors – some before 17 – leaving for other clubs has also begun to carve into their playing depth.
But if there’s a silver lining in having the richest line of rugby league talent in the world, it’s that more often than not, the lure to leave literally pays off.
“You have the shits for a day when they go, but you wake up the next day and you say, ‘Well, that could be life changing for that young man’,” Cameron says.
From Stephen Crichton, Spencer Leniu, Matt Burton and Jarome Luai, all signed multimillion-dollar deals at new homes.
“I haven’t done the maths lately, but at one point there, 18 of the last 24 players to leave our club had gone on to sign the biggest contracts they’d ever signed,” Cameron said.
“So in some way, you got to be a little bit proud of that. Some way you’re a little bit shitty that they’ve left. But definitely one outweighs the other, for sure.”
DOOMSDAY SCENARIO
Which includes the doomsday scenario no one in Penrith would ever dare imagine: what life would look like without Nathan and Ivan Cleary.
It might be written word for word in his job description, but, somewhere hidden in a deep dark corner of his office, Cameron already has the answer.
“That’s my job,” he says.
“We don’t sit in recruitment meetings with the coach at one end of the table and go, ‘What’s your son doing?’ We don’t talk like that.
“But in saying that, I’m selfishly planning that they’re here through the next cap cycle. I have no reason to think they won’t be.”