This horrific trail of club destruction makes next year’s Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast an interesting proposition. As you read this, the host city is sprucing up to welcome thousands of athletes, officials and visitors and a worldwide television audience of more than 1.5 billion for what will be the biggest event in Australia this decade.

Inside Sport recently took up an invite by Tourism and Events Queensland to be part of an “Energy and Adrenalin”-themed famil. We were among the first media to experience the Games’ early buzz. On first-hand inspection, and subsequent research of the footy landscape of the late 1980s, it seems it wasn’t necessarily the area’s fault that all those teams keeled over. For many of them, it was the way they went about trying to extract too much from the Gold Coast in too short a time that secured their demise.

As respected historians David Middleton and Ian Heads wrote in their 2008 book A Centenary Of Rugby League, the emergence of the Gold Coast as the final piece in the NSWRL’s 16-team jigsaw came more as a result of league’s desire to avoid an unwieldy 15-club set-up than any local push for inclusion.

The Gold Coast Chargers lament another try against them in 1998. (Photo by Getty Images)

The “Internationals Consortium” was one of three unsuccessful bidders for the proposed Brisbane team (eventually the Broncos). They quickly transferred their energies to a Gold Coast bid and won the approval of the NSWRL in May of 1987.

In 1989, former internationals Peter Gallagher, Bob Hagan and John Sattler relinquished control of the Giants, with the license handed over to the prosperous Seagulls Leagues Club.

In 1995, the ARL refused to upgrade a rescue package for the embattled club. Across the 1995-96 off-season, the league took back the GC license it had given to local entrepreneur Jeff Muller, due to several high-level staffers quitting on account of not being able to work with the so-called eccentric manager, who had rebranded the club as the “Gladiators” (by the start of the ’96 season, the league had rebranded the club again, this time to the Chargers).