Maybe room for another knockout comp similar to the Regal/John Player Trophy of the 80's and 90's. The Channel 4 Cup? Only if there are 22 league games mind.

Everyone goes on about raising the salary cap

Where is the money coming from to do that ?

Virtually every suggestion IMG have come up with so could we .

IMG need to help raise some revenue that is what is needed most

Oh and if you have no relegation , there are going to be plenty of dead rubbers the last third of the season

We already have a lot of dead rubbers at the bottom of the league even with relegation

Extra cup comps, 2 legged ties, mid March start. Some of this is mental, but it’s all just surface level window dressing.

We need to radically redefine the fabric of the game in this country. We need to explore, implement, and perfect innovative and fresh ways of marketing and growing the game, whilst fortifying, replenishing, and refreshing the foundations of the sport on a micro and macro level. <insert other flowery business vernacular and platitudes>.

From what I can see, all IMG have done is consult people within the game who have said “let’s go back to franchising” and they’ve gone “ok yeah, let’s do that”. They’ve then repackaged it. “Slavery with extra steps” (if you don’t watch Rick and Morty you won’t understand the reference).

I’ve seen this one before.

They've rebadged it you fool!

I understand all about investing in sports clubs. I was involved in sourcing funding for a basketball team some years ago from a bunch of high net worth investors. The thing is though that even a loss-making sporting team can be of interest to people with real money, if nothing else for tax purposes. But it has to be an attractive, high-profile thing to invest in.

The pitch will be also be that if you can grow the sport enough, you can make a lot of money if you sell out later, even if clubs aren't making big profits during the growth phase.

Those two reasons are why mega-wealthy people are pouring cash into the Football Championship, probably the most financially unsustainable competition in world sport.

We can't replicate all of that, as clearly we don't have a Premiership pot of gold. But I think RL needs to try to attract some of this money, as there's simply not enough money in the game to be able to just magic up major improvements organically. Otherwise we're just reorganizing chairs on the Titanic.

No partridge fans? Disappointing.

And on that bombshell!

“Ask me again, i’m not driving a mini metro, or signing for Leigh”

Serious question (as in, not a frivolous one) -

I've often thought that we lack a 'homebase', every other sport has a national stadium, football has Wembley, RU has Twickenham, Cricket has Lords (traditionally), how much do you think it would help England RL both in attraction and expanse if we had a purpose built National RL stadium?

Apparently, these measures are planned to be introduced in 2025, and the process and grading criteria will be be made fully public.

I know RU has some real financial difficulties at club level, but its interesting that their cap is at 5 million already. Even taking into account bigger squads it gives an idea of how much more money has been sloshing around RU. There's also a lesson about trying to maintain solvency while growing, even if we did manage to attract a lot of new money.....

On the face of it, its a nice thought, but I would presume the cost would make it a non starter.

Presumably you would want it to be big enough to stage the CC & GF, so you are looking at 50,000 capacity as minimum? Granted it's in London and 60 odd thousand capacity, but Spurs new stadium supposedly cost £1B.

Even at a quarter of that on some northern brownfield site is a hell of commitment.

Sounds like Odsal to me, could me a
Game wide
Community project. Bring your own brush

Taking out the logistics of finance, location etc, I'm more interested in the idea of a homebase for the CC/GF/Magic Weekend/Internationals etc Do people think it would be a good thing for and would it perhaps generate more attention to and an attraction for the sport, if we could focus and centralise a homebase for it?

Wembley is our national stadium too, we should use it for the cup final, and a Tier 1 international every year. Northern Stadia are enough for what we need.

Massive Partridge fan, just coming to the topic late

I wrote liked the idea. You can then have it as part of the season ticket, v because all SL teams will have at least 1 home game in the CC. That makes the reduction in guaranteed home games only 1 if we reduce the games in the league, but also makes the CC feel a bit more special. The smaller clubs get a chance to play at a full big stadium, and also get a chance to get a SL team at their own ground and seek their own coffers

But yet not good enough to qualify for a licence in pooperleague.

So you think we should keep yoyo promotion and relegation?

I think we should have P&R, and the promoted team should be given a Seasons grace to try and get established. By the time a team gets promoted ,all the best players have gone, so whatever recruitment they do get, they will be weak from the off, hence the continuing yoyoing.

I don't disagree with that but I think it needs to go further as the longevity of a club (given the nature of our sport, funding etc) needs to be on a more sustainable basis than scraping enough wins together in one season to stay up. Licensing, if done well, is the way to go.

Our sport simply doesn’t have the finances or participation to handle P&R, it can and does ruin clubs on an annual basis.

We need to return to licensing, with clear transparent criteria, and without a cap on the number of clubs that can participate in the top division.

It’s the only way to attract the long term investment required to make clubs viable in the long term. Anything else is pandering to failures.

I think the only way to have sustainable P&R is through having 2 tiers of Super League (perhaps 2 leagues of 10). The funding would need to be there for all clubs to be full time working to the same cap and squad structure. The clubs should be encouraged to produce their own players with exemptions against the cap to stop them filling their squads with journeymen. But all this couldn't happen within a fee years, it would have to be a long term plan based on having good sponsorship for the league, and broadcasting deals. But that doesn't come without a good product to start with. So having the 12 year contract in place with IMG makes sense.

Too often the league have looked at the next 3 years and that's it. So then at the end of that period, when things haven't changed, they try something new again. It all needs road mapping so clubs and potential sponsors can see where the game is going.

if we promote leigh and have p and r then leigh and Toulouse will swop places for the next few seasons.
having a 3 year franchise, for want of a better word, also gives championship sides time to grow