Brisbane's founding director Barry Maranta says the Dolphins are the best thing that could have happened to the Broncos.
He's told the Broncos exactly that.
Maranta was one of the four founding directors of the club who recruited Wayne Bennett as founding coach in 1988.
He was disgusted when Bennett was sacked by the Broncos in 2018 and his relationship with the club thawed as a result when he publicly expressed his angst.
Bridges have been mended.
"The Broncos recently asked me to speak to their commercial and marketing team and I said to them, 'the Dolphins are the best thing that has happened to you'," Maranta told AAP..
"I said that's because they are going to get bums on seats. Instead of saying to your sponsors we are getting 20,000 at games, the Broncos can now say we are getting 50,000. As a business it is wonderful for you bottom line.
"If the Dolphins had any other coach it wouldn't have had nearly the same vigour and excitement as what has happened with Benny (Wayne Bennett). He is just the master of organising a football team and what surrounds it."
A record stand-alone crowd for a club game of 51, 047 attended the Broncos' 18-12 win over the Dolphins on Friday night 27 years after the previous local derby at the same ground where 34,263 fans attended a Broncos-South Queensland Crushers clash.
When Maranta and his fellow directors started the Broncos the initial aim was to be a success.
He said it was always in the back of his mind at the time that the next step would be for the game to institute another Brisbane team.
"All I asked when (the NSWRL) asked me for a half-a-million dollar bond was to give us three years and if we couldn't do a good job we didn't want exclusivity," Maranta said.
The Broncos became a huge success and the biggest show in town.
Maranta, who once ran the London Broncos, worked with former Manchester United CEO Peter Kenyon to promote the Red Devils in Australia and other markets.
"I had seen the rivalries in Manchester between Manchester United and Manchester City. I had noted the soccer rivalry when Scotland played England," Maranta said.
"All we wanted at the Broncos was a capacity crowd which would be generated by that kind of rivalry.
"Surprisingly the Gold Coast weren't travelling well when we started but we got almost a full house. It was almost the derby of that time.
"Then when the Crushers entered (in 1995) we got very good crowds against them. They weren't successful, but the people who came along were those who wanted us to win and those who wanted us to lose."
Maranta said the Broncos-Dolphins derby would prove to be "great for rugby league".
"It is dominating the media. People grab me and want to talk about it. It is just a wonderful vibe," he said.
"Benny has come up here and done wonderful things at the Dolphins.
"We never wanted him to be coaching against the Broncos because he was part and parcel of what we achieved. There was a time when you would have got 100-1 about that happening. It is a Hollywood script really."
