The never-ending saga of the former Balmain Leagues Club in Rozelle is both parable and metaphor. For Sydney, it is a story of how our view of development in the mid-2010s helped to shape our current housing predicament. And for Tigers fans like me, it is the physical embodiment of our club’s long and painful descent into being the worst professional sporting club in Australia.

This week, the Herald revealed that a standoff between developer Perifa and Wests Tigers’ owners, the Holman Barnes Group, threatens to extend the two-decade saga over the redevelopment of the Victoria Road site and the attempt to resurrect the leagues club where Benji Marshall and co celebrated the club’s only premiership in 2005.

The dispute relates, basically, to a tit-for-tat over the size and cost of a future club within the $285 million mixed-use development. Inner West mayor Darcy Byrne has written to Perifa managing director Fabrizio Perilli to note that the approval depends on the Tigers operating a club at the site. Perilli says Byrne is jumping at shadows. The Holman Barnes Group says it still wants a club at the site, but will it own the club or pay rent to secure it? It will be owner or tenant, says Perilli.

But leaving aside the specifics of that entanglement for a moment, the history of the troubled development is an interesting cautionary tale. It is also, to be honest, just another brick in the wall for the Wests Tigers fan base, for whom “long-suffering” no longer feels an adequate descriptor. Sisyphean fans? Psychically disturbed fans?

The cursed history of the leagues club makes The Odyssey feel modest in scope, but, in the context of the Tigers’ broader malaise, has faded into the background. Just one tile in the mosaic of woe.

It is difficult to ignore, however, that the demise of the old Balmain Leagues Club dovetails neatly with the joint-venture’s worst years. It was also directly responsible for the club’s takeover by the Holman Barnes Group. Those two facts do not seem unrelated. But more on that later.

The short(ish) version is that in the mid-2010s, facing falling revenue and growing debt, the former Balmain Tigers began exploring partnerships with developers who could turn the prime Rozelle site into a housing complex with shops and a new club on the ground floor.

This fairly straightforward plan, first raised in 2004, was followed by the global financial crisis, the associated collapse of the club’s original development partner, several years of redevelopment schemes thwarted by community and council opposition, a long and ridiculous saga involving various state government plans to either build or not build a Metro station around or below the club, and just your run-of-the-mill staggering financial mismanagement.

The various proposals have gone through too many iterations to list, but suffice to say sustained community opposition, combined with local and state government planning obstacles, and developer avarice, all played a part in arriving at the current state of play. Ironically, the development now under construction is larger than what was originally envisioned.

There is blame to go around here, but, in the current context, in which the housing debate has largely dissolved into a NIMBY versus YIMBY dichotomy, it provides some nuance. In the mid-2010s, when residents or councils fretted about ugly or shoddy housing developments, the reality is that they often had a point. Remember the Opal Tower.

And yet, the consequence of some of that opposition is that the stark housing shortfall we now find ourselves in has given developers the whip hand. The feasibility of the project has been helped by Perifa taking advantage of the state’s infill housing bonus (which allows developers to build higher in exchange for increasing the share of affordable housing in a project) and the presale finance guarantee (in which the government goes guarantor on unsold homes up to $50 million per project). But Perifa is still having to be cajoled to provide the leagues club on which the entire redevelopment was predicated.

Which brings up another quandary: how much sympathy should we have if Holman Barnes Group loses out in this negotiation.

The site had sat empty, increasingly derelict and occasionally on fire, from its closure in 2010 until it was finally demolished last year. As a result, in the intervening years, the Balmain side of the Wests Tigers merger went bust. Holman Barnes Group – the Western Suburbs Magpies side of the merger, for non-league fans – took control in 2019.

But Holman Barnes – which raked in about $52 million from poker machines in 2025 – is not some quaint community club run off the smell of an oily rag. It is a $100 million gaming and restaurant entity that owns and runs – quite poorly, I would argue – the Wests Tigers football club via an obscure debenture system which effectively gives about 20 people who paid $100 in the 1950s control over the election of the majority of its board of directors.

The debenture holders, in their $100 wisdom, have repeatedly chosen representatives who seem to have an almost preternatural capacity to make the Tigers look ridiculous. The most recent example being the decision in the off-season to oust the leadership at head office, just as it was finding stability, reportedly because the jerseys were too orange. The board then granted the unproven head coach a three-year contract extension in a panicked bid to tame the backlash.

This is not to suggest Balmain was a charitable endeavour. A big part of the money troubles that led to the plan to redevelop the club was the Star City Casino’s impact on its revenue.

But the current standoff is, in effect, two large corporate vehicles simply haggling over whether and how much they’re willing to pay or be paid to build somewhere for Tigers fans to drown our sorrows after the long walk pushing that boulder up Balmain Road from Leichhardt.

Michael McGowan is The Sydney Morning Herald’s state political editor.