Agree re repeat loop fixtures but there’s far from enough quality players to have 16-20 teams, not to mention them being viable businesses. 14 tops, though we’re scraping the barrel at 12!

This is where you I disagree - the best interest of the game is to generate as much external revenue as possible - this can only happen if the elite competition is of a standard that attracts suitable TV and external sponsorship. To do this we need to improve the quality on the field and increase participation neither of which the Championship really contribute towards.

Destroying the championship clubs for relatively trivial amounts of money is not productive. The fans of those clubs are core rugby league consumers, who buy sky subscriptions, have kids who play the game and who go to big events like internationals or the grand final. The stuff coming out of the arrogant mouths of lie likes of Lenagan is pushing all those people away.

The game has ripped itself apart over money and arbitrary divisions for the past two decades. It isn't healthy and I strongly believe that those clubs who have been lucky enough to be at the top table when the music has stopped have no right to destroy the futures of clubs, many historically larger, who are not top flight right now.

Growing the game is essential. Not destroying the existing game and a large segment of the existing fan base is also essential.

In what way are the championship clubs being destroyed. I understand the funding is to remain the same until the next tv deal is negotiated. What happens after that is in the air in any case.

Are you in Hetherington’s fan club by any chance?

You say “I strongly believe that those clubs who have been lucky enough to be at the top table when the music has stopped have no right to destroy the futures of clubs.” They are not lucky! They are where they are due to hard work, development, investment and success on the field.

These clubs offer very little - their core support is pathetic given the legacy of many of these clubs - their facilities are - on the main - embarrassing I fail to see what investing in this sector actually brings that spending that amateur clubs would not. The numbers are so small the impact on Sky revenues would be minimal even if they all downed tools and quit SKY if some of these clubs were merged with others.

If Hunslet merged with Leeds do you really think the numbers of kids playing at Parkside would be diminished - kids play RL primarily because of peer pressure/need to be part of a gang.

The problem with the game is two fold: participation and the standard of the professional game - neither of which can be addressed by increased investment in the Championship and its clubs.

I've no strong views on the league structure, Seen 16 team playoffs through to 4 up, 4 down and everything in between , I suspect this current version will only last a few years.

Lenaghan, Elstone and co have their wish of ending super 8's - to help market games, draw in crowds and attract sponsors.

Just one minor issue, they have replaced it with loopy fixtures which they cannot yet explain who will play who and when. I suspect they will be very keen to manipulate this to help bring in coin - so expect a saints / Wigan game and hull Derby as 2 certain loopy games.

If wood or now rimmer had come up with a new structure that is not explainable to the fans, media, tv companies or sponsors they would have been rightly slaughtered by Lenaghan and co.

Pretty pathetic from Elstone and all the supposed genius business brains of the 11 SL clubs that they have agreed a new structure that is half baked.

What’s wrong with having a franchise structure where every 3 years any clubs can apply and be considered along with every other club? Why does someone have to drop out of the top division for someone else to be accommodated?

If it really is for monetary terms then those running the clubs and the game need to decide if they are doing it for he good of the game or for the good of themselves.

I agree. Franchise is the way to go. 14 teams inside next 2 years. Expand further if lower league clubs get the infrastructure right and have some money behind them.

Seems to me like we are going backwards. We used to have a twelve team league and then contrived extra fixtures . before that a 14 team league . All of these have been tried and then deemed as failures. No one coming up with any thing new . We have had a franchised system before , that didn`t work either.

The franchise model should have been the best approach. The problem was that the system was so badly set up because it measured the wrong things and encouraged the wrong behaviours. It encouraged clubs to give out unsustainably cheap tickets in order to meet the "average attendance" criteria for example, when the measurement should have been based around ticket revenue. That would have forced clubs to focus much more on how they market themselves to actually grow - free and cheap tickets isn't marketing.

That was what escalated Bradford's problems. The club devalued its product by selling it cheaply, it cut its profit margin to meet the attendance criteria and, when the bank pulled its credit line, it couldn't regain that profit margin.

There is no magic bullet to sort this out, too many teams in the North of England, Union in competition with league ( Union also struggling in the North of England ) 12 teams fighting over the pot of money given by SKY. The whole point of the three monkeys is to keep more of the money, so unless there is a huge cash injection from Sky at the next renewal then there will be no progress to 14 teams, hence the need for the loop games. Poor marketing at best and trying to make the game more appealing by including teams from France, surely they should have tried marketing the better off part of France as opposed to an area h little cash.
Looking at the Championship we have teams competing less than 5 miles from each other, even teams in the SL are too close together. Maybe it is time for a total rethink on how the game should be run. Start by cutting back the teams in the lower divisions, using them as feeder clubs. The SL clubs cannot afford to run a reserve team where will the money come from to pay the players, all it will do is dilute the Sky money even further, the standard will simply fall. You may as well play the reserves as we do now as duel registration etc. There are too many teams in such a small area across the north of England. People talk about promotion and relegation well since they introduced relegation and promotion the standards have not got any better, the only way the standards will improve is by getting more money into the sport and paying higher salaries to the top players. Paying the same to Salford, Wakefield and Widnes and others simply reduces the quality of the sport to the lowest of the low, The salary cap should be based on average attendance and not equally by each team. Teams with the highest support should be better rewarded and allowed to spend more money on players, simply capping everyone as the same will reduce the quality of the game.

I would wager your team has relatively good support.

At the very least, the salary cap should have increased in line with inflation. In real terms, the salary cap today is around £1m less than it was in 1999.

I have no issue with the concept of a salary cap - nobody wants to go back to the era where Wigan ed money that they didn't have buying up all of the talent, and where clubs like Leeds almost went into oblivion themselves by chasing after them - but we can't carry on giving the talent real-terms pay cuts for another two decades and we certainly shouldn't be in a position where clubs still can't afford to pay to a salary cap that was set nearly 20 years ago.

Would replacing the salary cap with a form of FFP work? Perhaps. If clubs want to spend more on players, it's up to them to come up with the growth to fund them. I seem to recall that the original salary cap had a "50% turnover or £1.9m, whichever was smaller" policy, before the 50% rule was scrapped.

The cap has been used to lower standards across the board. When Gallopp was CEO of the NRL in the mid 2000s he said that some SL teams were only paying 30-40% of the cap, compared to the NRL where most teams were at the limit. So by freezing it the bigger clubs have saved some money whilst others have probably gradually crept towards it.

As for the current system, it may have looked like a good idea, but it just hasn't worked.

Super 8s don't create any more meaningful games than just a straight playoff system - in the four years since it started only one team has made the top 4 from outside, and that was when Salford imploded from 4th.

The Middle s8s do create interest but put four SL teams in danger and forces them to take short term measures to try to stay up. Whilst it hasn't happened, it would have been possible for Widnes to finish bottom, sign a few stars for a couple of weeks and stay up at the expense of the 9th placed team. That clearly is not what was intended.

I have more sympathy as well with clubs complaining about the inability to plan and market games well in advance, and the crowds (for SL sides at least) are awful in both S8s and Middle 8s because those games can't be sold properly as part of the season ticket packages.

All in all it was an interesting experiment but ultimately a dud. Whilst I prefer franchising, 1-up 1-down will at least promote stability for more clubs in SL, and probably thr Championship as well.

Brodie is quite correct, there is no magic bullet to fix this problem. The product ie -the game is poor and stale the majority of players are lacking in talent. Most coaches are obsessed with statistics, very little ingenuity is on view. The super league is supposed to be highly professional. Yet to a large section of players the wages are quite poor. The salary cap needs to be uplifted to attract better quality players. If not the game will continue as it is going nowhere with sky propping the game up.

do we know which teams voted for and against last Friday ?

It was a secret ballot. Other than a couple of clubs that made their positions public, the individual votes aren't revealed.

Yep I’d go with the % of turnover figure for establishing the salary cap. But I’d exclude both Sky TV money and loans from the revenue figure. So clubs can’t rely on directors loans and essentially money they haven’t earned to help them. I’d also put the figure closer to 30% than 50% as I think nowhere near enough is spent on club inrastructure. So if someone like Koukash wants to come into a club and spend a lot on players he still can do, he’s just got to spend elsewhere as well instead of simply inflating player wages across the board for a few years and then sodding off.

I have been following League for 60 years and in my experience the game has always relied on imported talent to bring the crowds in, be it top international Union players especially from Wales, or top League players from down under.

However both these sources have dried up over recent years to such an extent that SL is very much the poor relation nowadays.

We have never produced enough home grown talent to replace these star signings and our own young players now lack the experience of playing alongside great players and learning from them. All this has produced a steady decline in the quality of the product to such an extent that all that is left is the physicality which on its own is just boring.

The time has come for some radical thinking to arrest this decline and maybe we should be seriously developing Nines RL in the UK which could bring back the crowds and sponsors and appeal to the TV audience.

Agreed - RU's style is becoming like RL but with significantly more money to back it up

Nines has the potential to be to RL what T20 is to cricket - an exciting concept that lets the flair players show off their skills and appeals to a brand new audience that isn't necessarily interested in the hard graft and the nuances of forward play that the purists enjoy. If I were Elstone, some kind of Nines event would be one of the first things I'd be looking at introducing. Create the event, hype it and sell it to whatever city is willing to bid for it.

But knowing RL, we'd host it on a Tuesday night in Leigh, pack the teams with academy players and then dismiss the idea as a failure.

I had in mind ditching the loop games and the Magic weekend and having a series of weekend knock out competitions at different venues in a separate NINES championship so that SL players could be available.

As you say this could like T20 in cricket and I believe it would catch on with the public, TV and sponsors for the overall good of the game.

It would be a great opportunity for youngster and could bring back the smaller faster backs with skills who would also play alongside the better SL players who would relish playing on TV in front of large crowds. In turn it could improve the standard of SL

Using 9s as a replacement for Loop fixtures is a good shout (although I'd keep MW). Host almost a second league, with rounds inserted at various points in the season, played at a football venue (say, six rounds, each team plays two games on Sat and two on Sun?). It would need a serious prize money incentive for the clubs to buy into it though.

Yes this is the sort of thing I had in mind and it would soon draw in the crowds and money from TV and sponsorship.

With SL dying before our eyes the game needs some out of the box thinking and I believe that in Nines we have a better product than the very successful 7s in Union. So some serious investment and promotion is required and like T20 in cricket it could go International as countries like PNG and Figi and dare I say England who could compete on equal terms with the Ossies.