Quote ="bramleyrhino"Except, as I pointed out, the "objectives" that people seem to be holding them to seem to be:
a) completely made up.
b) completely out of their control.
Catalans are not and cannot be held responsible for the successes or failures of the FFRXII.
Everton and Tottenham have a wide and diverse audience that advertisers want to reach. They also have a global appeal, pulling in viewers and supporters from all around the world - audiences that advertisers want to reach.
Featherstone does none of those things.
That's not my logic in the slightest. When it comes to generating sponsorship and broadcast revenue, what matters is the audience that the sport reaches. Being in big cities can help with that but it is not, in itself, a solution to the problem. Paris had no audience upon which they could build a sustainable club.
Agreed
Disagree. The sport needs finances in order to make it more attractive to star players and to retain the talent that it has, but that revenue also plays a huge role in supporting the grass roots of the sport. Much of the RFU's youth development and community work is funded by NatWest and Mitsubishi - that's sponsors directly investing in the player pool, supporting participation and investing in facilities.
Disagree. RL is already played in schools across the heartlands.
The sport, and more particuarly the clubs, would get a far better return from expanding their reach and growing their audience amongst the groups that advertisers, sponsors and broadcasters care about. Professional sport today is essentially a form of media, and we need to start thinking like one - a magazine or TV show that sells content to an audience, and that sells access to that audience to potential advertisers. That's where the revenue comes into the sport to fund pretty much everything else.
The biggest failure with this sport is that it spends too much time focusing on the people who already buy the product, and not enough time listening to the people who don't. At the moment, the only person who does seem to be doing that is Adam Hills. Until we address that, this sport will continue to go nowhere.'"
The objectives are not made up- go look back at all the rfl statements giving their reasons for artificially promoting Catalan.
Toronto and every other expansion club would also lack these audiences, the point is that the name/location of the club does not effect the ability to attract sponsors much at all.
What makes you think that Toronto or New York or any other half baked expansion team would have a more sustainable audience than Paris or London did? Catalan is a bit of an anomaly in that there was already a pretty decent RL following in Perpingnan.
Sponsors could help but chasing them blindly with gimicks won't cause any sponsor to act in the way Natwest do for the RFU.
RL is not played in nearly enough schools in the big northern cities, there are huge sections of manchester and leeds that either play RU or no rugby code at all and huge sections of Liverpool where people wouldn't even know what RL is. If we don't effectively grow our game in its supposed heartland then what chance has it of growing elsewhere?
(and hammered.....2 bottles deep hammered)'"
