The chatter may be mostly coming from British press, but its volume and repetition has made it impossible to ignore. About whether the Wallabies are worthy adversaries for the British & Irish Lions ahead of the first Test in Brisbane on Saturday. Whether Australia – especially without the injured duo Rob Valetini and Will Skelton – will muster much, if any, resistance.

Whether the mostly one-sided warm-up matches have provided the preparation the Lions would have liked or the spectators deserved. Whether, even, Lions officials should entertain interest from continental Europe, or South America, before committing to another tour to Australia in 2037.

What to make of all the noise, according to Glen Ella, the former Wallaby and now the assistant coach for the First Nations & Pasifika XV? “That’s a lot of shit,” he said this week. “Yes, we need to start winning some games, but we’ll be trying our best, and I don’t think it’s all as doom as gloom as people make out.”

As far as doom goes, Rugby Australia’s $37m loss last year is about as bad as it gets. And as for gloom, one need only look at the faces of the Australia players after their 2023 World Cup group exit and record loss to Wales. Back then the Wallabies – two-time World Cup winners no less – had dropped to No 10 in the world.

But the past 12 months have represented a turning point for rugby union in Australia. The Lions tour is expected to help clear Rugby Australia’s debt, and the 2027 home men’s World Cup is hoped to provide the game with more than $100m in cash reserves that can be re-invested. The 2029 women’s World Cup, also to be held in Australia, and the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, where the sevens sides will compete for medals, complete the so-called golden decade and provide a firm foundation for rugby’s future.

The question is what comes next. Can the Wallabies – back this week to a ranking of No 6 in the world – return to their status of Australia’s favourite sporting team, as they enjoyed in 2003 when Jonny Wilkinson foiled World Cup dreams? Could the Wallaroos, taking a leaf out of the Matildas’ playbook, usurp their male counterparts in the nation’s eye by the time the 2029 World Cup rolls around?

Or, at the other end of the spectrum, is there still a place for professional rugby union in the white-hot competition of the Australian sporting marketplace? And what happens to the sport’s community if RA adopts a fiscally conservative agenda? “It’s never going to go away,” Ella said, offering a sense of calm. “It’s a global sport, and it’s a fantastic sport, that we love.”To assess whether the Lions would want to come back in 2037, the commercial realities are impossible to ignore. Australia has vast stadiums and is – to many – a more desirable touring location than either South Africa or New Zealand. The entity that administers the Lions, as well as travel operators connected to the tour, are expected to make twice or even three times more profit in 2025 than they have for any previous tour.

The RA chief executive, Phil Waugh, has estimated there are more than 40,000 Lions fans in Australia right now, driving attendances and making provincial politicians and the tourism and hospitality sectors giddy. There have been record crowds in Perth and Adelaide – a new stop on the tour – and the take from tickets for the third Test will be the highest for any single sporting event ever held at Sydney’s Accor Stadium.

Under commercial arrangements – many struck during the previous RA regime, headed by the much-maligned former chair Hamish McLennan – there are winners on all sides. The Lions players have agreed to a profit-share model for the 2025 tour for the first time, ensuring they take home around $200,000 for six weeks of work. The sheer financial might of the tour demands that, even if Australia falls to a humbling series defeat in this transitional epoch under Joe Schmidt, the Lions will return. Whether a future tour might be shorter, with fewer provincial games, or tacked on to stopovers in South America, Japan or the Pacific, will be considered in due course. But the Lions will begin negotiations for the next tour in 2032, just as rugby’s Australian renaissance is expected to peak, and RA should – in theory – be approaching the negotiating table from a position of strength.

Of course, to speculate in any detail about the world a decade into the future, in the midst of geopolitical uncertainty and market volatility, is brave. Yet the Australian rugby community is still sore from the squandering of generational riches from the 2003 World Cup. In the wake of rapid executive turnover, the long term is now the only term at Moore Park and sustainability has become a buzzword.

RA’s strategy to 2029 has pillars of better on-field performance, more participants and increasing commercial revenues. But the governing body has conceded it must “right-size” the business. With clubs, schools, Super Rugby franchises, sevens programs, representative players and the broader rugby community all desperate to be part of the sport’s future, Waugh faces his most difficult decision in choosing where – and where not – to invest.

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The demise of the Melbourne Rebels is the most public evidence of the new regime’s world view and its reformulated appetite for investment. The club’s closure also remains a sore point for a state which has produced the John Eales Medallist Valetini and the Lions centre Sione Tuipulotu.

The president of Rugby Victoria, Elizabeth Radcliffe, said Australia’s largest city remained an untapped rugby resource. “I’ve had conversations with Phil and Dan [Herbert, the RA chair] about this and said: ‘Do you see a future for it [a Melbourne franchise]?’ And their answer was ‘yes, but’, and the ‘but’, of course, is it needs to be financially sustainable,” she said.

But as the Wallabies prepare to be tested against the Lions, she said RA cannot afford to retreat. “If you want to build something higher or increase the height of the pinnacle, you’ve got to widen the base,” Radcliffe said. “It’s just basic engineering principles.”

Joe Schmidt (right) has overseen a change in fortunes for Australia since the 2023 World Cup. Photograph: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile/Getty ImagesThere is doubt that the Lions will return to Australia in 2037. Photograph: David Gray/AFP/Getty Images