I first heard about plans to ‘get back' News Limited's half of rugby league in 2002. I was in Toulouse, at a four-team tournament involving NSW Country, Manly Juniors and two French teams.

Standing on the modest hill at Stade Des Minimes, sipping red wine and eating pate as experimental planes swept overheard, then-Penrith chief executive Shane Richardson outlined some plans that sounded more than grandiose.

He said NRL clubs, despite their parlous financial state, were going to band together and march into Holt Street with what cash they could scrape together, and ask for their game back.

It was all off-the-record, Richo said as he eyed the saucisson sandwiches, but it sounded so unlikely that I am not sure I would have written it if I could have.

Then came the poker machine tax in New South Wales, which ripped $10 million from NRL club budgets in one year, according to one estimate.

Rugby league was scarcely in position to buy cornerposts and balls, let alone its own freedom.

The confluence of factors which led to the ARL on Thursday agreeing to an independent commission may never be fully understood but some of them are on the public record.

With television rights expiring in a couple of years, News wanted to remove the conflict of interests which saw it, in effect, negotiating with itself.

The media empire inflicted the Super League War upon us and, to its credit I guess, always intended to nurse the game it savagely beat back to health before leaving it to its own devices.

With a World Cup making a profit, almost 80,000 people attending a preliminary final and last year's (slightly fudged) crowds up on the (slightly fudged) crowds of most seasons previous, there was every indication that a battered game was up and about, moving freely, once more.

Other factors included the arrival of Gold Coast chief executive Michael Searle, a visionary unencumbered by the cartels and back-scratching favoured by league administrators for eons.

So in 2009, Searle, Richardson, Brisbane's Bruno Cullen, Parramatta's Denis Fitzgerald and Newcastle's Steve Burraston were part of a committee that finally marched into Surry Hills as Richo had predicted back in the sunny, windy south of France seven winters earlier.

By then, they had a structure in mind - a commission based on the AFL model. They had toyed with adding one-sixteenth of the game to each club's balance sheet - but discarded the idea when they realised a millionaire or two could take over rugby league in the southern hemisphere and shut it down if they took over eight or more impoverished clubs.

When these veterans of chook raffles and junior registration mornings shuffled along mahogany row, they were in for a massive shock.

News didn't want any money at all to get out of rugby league! They just wanted the ARL to get out as well.

The ARL existed on a handout from the body it half-owned, so that shouldn't have been too difficult.

But it was. One hundred and three years of stewardship over the game is a long time.

Finally on Thursday, the ARL voted themselves out of running rugby league.

The road ahead is long. The first commissioners will be appointed by News and the ARL in one final power play by the soon-to be former owners.

But in three or four years, league will hopefully run for its own sake. Since the northern clubs voted to break away from the Rugby Football Union when they met at the George Hotel, Huddersfield, in 1895, that has happened very, very rarely.

Since then, almost without a break, rugby league has been a gravy train for working class opportunists and those who wished to exploit the working class for a quick buck. While other sports expanded, rugby league has contracted under the weight of its one greed and avarice.

On Thursday morning, I rang Richardson with a bit of amusing gossip. Official match program Big League had accidentally published a rather serious expletive in a kids' crossword.

When he called back in the afternoon, he said "What about that!"

I knew nothing of the ARL meeting earlier in the day. "You mean the ‘c**t in Big League?" I said.

No. He meant the c**t finally being edited out of rugby league.