MAX DELMEGE does not throw any passes or make any tackles for Manly. He doesn't even take the field. But the Sea Eagles would not be the on-field force they are without his enormous financial investment in the club as co-owner. In fact, they would be grounded.

"Manly wouldn't be alive," Grant Mayer, the club's chief executive, said. "They would be dead. It would be a 15-team comp, no doubt about it. He absolutely saved this club by getting involved, and we were later blessed by the Penn family coming in with their investment as well."

Multimillionaire businessman Delmege, in a recent interview with the Herald, declared privatisation was also "the way to go" for other clubs and said he was sure other wealthy people would be prepared to back football clubs. They just had to be "approached the right way".

Delmege didn't become successful by throwing away money and, when he chose to back the club, its management had to prove it could turn around Manly's fortunes - on and off the field. They have gone a long way towards doing that.

"It was an opportunity to fix things up," Mayer said. "And if the club didn't take that opportunity, Manly was bound to fall on hard times again, because there is no way Max and Scott [Penn], as businessmen, could be expected to stay involved and keep putting money in unless the situation improved.

"It was about minimising the loss in the short term, so the club could begin working its way towards eventually breaking even and being profitable in the future. If you can get as close as the club is now to breaking even, then there is no reason you can't think of getting into the black in the future.

"Ian Thompson and Pat Wilson went before me as chief executives here and did a great job in getting this process in motion, and Des Hasler and his staff have done a great job on the coaching side of things. One of the results was that the club was eventually able to start buying the sort of players we needed to add to the talent that was coming through, starting with Ben Kennedy.

"We've got massive limitations at the moment in terms of how much we can earn through reserved seating and corporate facilities at Brookvale Oval, but our situation will improve considerably in time for the 2010 season, when we are due to have additions to our grandstands completed."

Mayer said privatisation was something other NRL clubs should at least consider. "It works well for Manly because we're almost like Newcastle, in that we've got a big space to work in," he said.

"There are a million people stretching from the Harbour Bridge to the Central Coast who are potentially Manly fans … [It puts] pressure on all of the people involved in a club to perform. It makes everyone more accountable, and in business that can only be a good thing."

Greg Prichard