{"id":110454,"date":"2025-09-01T09:01:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T09:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/110454\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T09:01:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T09:01:08","slug":"british-and-irish-lions-tour-turns-rugby-australia-debt-free-status-as-phil-waugh-eyes-future-fund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/110454\/","title":{"rendered":"British and Irish Lions tour turns Rugby Australia debt-free status as Phil Waugh eyes future fund"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rugby Australia has wiped its debt and is planning to accelerate the creation of an investment fund after the success of this year\u2019s British and Irish Lions Tour provided enough financial headroom to run operations through to the 2027 World Cup.<\/p>\n<p>The governing body owed $63.5 million to Pacific Equity Partners as part of an $80 million loan provided in 2023 when rugby union was in deep financial turmoil. RA chief executive Phil Waugh and chief financial officer Richard Gardham said they had paid off the last of the debt and cancelled the agreement last Friday.<\/p>\n<p>Loading&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rugby Australia has wiped its debt and is planning to accelerate the creation of an investment fund after&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-110454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}