From Silvertails to struggle street: Can Manly return to their powerhouse past?

At their season launch at Manly Wharf in February, the Sea Eagles leaned into their proud history.

Premiership-winning captains Max Krilich, Geoff Toovey, Paul “Fatty” Vautin and Matt Orford took the stage for a Q and A, and there was a display of jerseys from the club’s glory days in the 1970s to their premiership strips of 1987, 1996, 2008 and 2011.

When the “class of 2026” was introduced one by one, there was also a nod to days gone by, with digital lanyards on the big screen showing how many seasons each of them had played for Manly.

This is the Sea Eagles’ 80th year in the competition and as they sipped on champagne and cans of beer from Brookvale Oval naming rights sponsor 4 Pines, the assembled Manly faithful might have just believed the anniversary would be marked with something special.

Instead, the club and its leadership have found themselves under examination following a dismal start to the season and the abrupt axing of head coach Anthony Seibold.

They finally got off the mark on Thursday night, thrashing a diabolical Dolphins 52-18 in Brisbane in coach Kieran Foran’s first game in charge.

But the early season struggles, when they lost their first three games, have brought into focus the bigger picture at Manly.

The Sea Eagles have only made the finals four times in the past decade and not progressed past week two, cycling through a handful of coaches and even more chief executives along the way.

Decision-making has also been brought into question by controversies such as the Pride jersey affair of 2022 and last year’s saga over the future of since-departed captain Daly Cherry-Evans.

While missed tackles and management mistakes have contributed to Manly’s melancholy, questions are being asked about whether they can return to their powerhouse past under their long-term private ownership.

Chairman Scott Penn, whose family has been majority shareholders since 2014, denies the club is run on the smell of an oily rag and has defended a round of austerity measures aimed at clawing back $1 million in payments to players who retired for medical reasons.

But the reality is that the once heavyweights of the competition, the “Silvertails”, are also-rans off the field.

One of the smallest operations in the NRL, they posted total revenue of $32.7 million in 2024, according to their most recently filed financial report. Of that, more than half was funded directly by the NRL, whose annual grant of $18 million to clubs now well exceeds the $12 million salary cap.

Their results put Manly among the most commercially challenged of Sydney teams, well below the likes of Penrith, Parramatta, South Sydney, Sydney Roosters and Canterbury.

Having enjoyed success at the helm of Weight Watchers, Scott Penn’s father, Rick, and mother, Heather, are wealthy enough to reportedly have had a suite on The World, a luxury private residential ship that sails continuously around the globe.

They hold three-quarters of the family’s stake in Manly. The other 25 per cent is owned by Scott, who has himself done well in business in the booming wellness sector and has been actively involved as chairman since 2007.

The Penns have sunk cash into the Sea Eagles. Corporate records from late 2024 showed Manly have a loan in the form of a convertible note of $9.98 million, a number that had been even higher before the club repaid $1.5 million in 2023.

Including their purchase of shares in Manly, the family had put in about $20 million in total over the years, according to Scott Penn.

But they also haven’t been left empty-handed by their association with Manly.

The Penns sold a quarter of the Sea Eagles to businessmen Gary Wolman and Andrew Michael in 2015 and a year later made a profit of $15 million offloading Manly Leagues Club.

They had paid $7.5 million in 2009 to buy the site of the beleaguered leagues club, which was $10 million in the red after helping to finance the Super League war against News Limited in the 1990s and had the debt called in by National Australia Bank when the global financial crisis hit and property prices plummeted.

The Penns, who have had a piece of the Sea Eagles since 2004 when Manly were rebuilding from the failed Northern Eagles merger and property developer Max Delmege came to their rescue, loaned the leagues club more than $5 million as part of the deal.

In 2016, they offloaded the site for $22.5 million to Chinese buyers, according to property records. The loan was repaid by the leagues club, which sold its car park across the road to the same buyers for $7.5 million.

Scott Penn says the suggestion that the leagues club transactions were a property ploy was “a bit of a misnomer”, but they certainly paid off.

“If we had have put that money into private real estate, it would have had the same return. Within the time we owned it, the whole market went up by that amount,” he says.

“And to be honest, we saved the leagues club because NAB were foreclosing on them. We weren’t looking at it as a property play. We were looking at it as a save play.”

The woes of the leagues club help explain Manly’s decline. Saddled with paying rent to the Malaysian owners who have since bought the land and car park, it can’t contribute financially to the Sea Eagles as Canterbury League Club does, for example, with the Bulldogs, although it does support junior development teams on the northern beaches and a team in the third-tier Ron Massey Cup.

The Sea Eagles, as a result, are left to bankroll Manly’s teams in the NSWRL under-17s and under-19s male and female competitions, which Scott Penn has been at pains to point out in defending budget cuts and overall club spending.

“The important distinction is we spend to the full salary cap and the full [$5.6 million] football department cap,” he says. “If you’re running on the smell of an oily rag, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

“Plus, we fund the junior reps to the tune of $3 million a year without any external support. Therefore, we have to be quite prudent in our financial management just to make sure everything balances.”

Manly are facing potentially more financial stress with legal action brought against the club by the family of Keith Titmuss, who died after collapsing at training in 2020, and fellow former Sea Eagles player Lloyd Perrett launching a $5 million lawsuit, claiming he had never recovered from arduous running sessions in 2017 when he was deprived of water.

They have also begun the season without a rear-of-jersey sponsor, a spot previously occupied by TripADeal, as they attempt to secure a new backer at the right price.

The Penns, however, have declared they are going nowhere.

They have rejected several offers for the club and have brought a third generation of the family into the corridors of power, with Scott’s 24-year-old son, Oliver, joining the Sea Eagles board, replacing his grandfather, Rick, who has stepped aside at the age of 80.

The appointment has raised eyebrows given his age and experience.

But asked whether he thought it could be perceived as nepotism, Scott Penn described the NRL’s youngest member of a club board as “an incredibly capable individual”.

“He’s a digital native who understands how to market to the masses through social media,” he says. “Most clubs would have boards who are 50 plus, so to have someone who is going to be the youngest director in the league, who can connect with a big bulk of our fans, is actually a great move in my view.”

As Foran bids to turn Manly’s season around, Scott Penn is due return next week to his home in New York, where he is based for much of the year.

He was there at the season launch in February and was in Sydney to make the call to sack Seibold and promote Foran last week.

Having a club chairman who spends time in the United States, though, has been another sore point for disgruntled Manly supporters.

The Penns ran out of patience with Seibold. Only time will tell if Manly fans run out of it with them.