Agreed. The Giants did a bit of marketing for this weekends game and go 3000 more than their last home game against HKR. There are plenty of reasons for a bit of a boost, but not a 3000 increase.

The problems with the game lie primarily with the clubs not doing enough to get people through the gates and put bums on seats. Hull have tried it this season with the season pass promotion, but the general marketing philosophy within Super League seems to be "drop the prices by a few quid and they'll come"; which isn't enough for several reason.

The RFL aren't perfect and there are plenty of problems with their marketing - have a look on the Magic Weekend's website and find the fixtures for example, but the reason for a drop in crowds isn't because of promotion and relegation or licensing, and if it is then get these people back through the gates.

I assume you mean ' content ' , franchising Qualification is irrelivant as long as the Championship clubs are so far behind SL standard, unfortunatly nobody including the RFL has a clue how to improve the Championships or the clubs in it, they are starting to suffer now and it isnt going to get any better

I personally think that rugby union has the right set-up. P&R but only if the club to be promoted is suitable in terms of stadium etc.

From my personal experience and championship our club as a whole, facilities, academy and finances grew slowly in our six years in the championship

Albeit however not everybody's as fortunate as some clubs with finances. I.e. us with ste oconnor

The idea has grown on me all day but what to do with points in the 2nd half of the season.

I`d be inclined to halve them in all the leagues but especially in the middle league rather than put them to zero in that one.

This still rewards the effort of the first half of the season and give the original championship clubs a small advantage against the 4 relegated.

For me though we also need to seriously look how we pack the grounds across the game rather than milk loyal fans.

We need to get tickets prices down - right down.

Too long we've hitched ourselves to football and ticket inflation.

We`re a northern sport and we are hurting much more in the recession than the south east.

2 hours minimum wage - 12.38 is where we need to be getting a majority of our tickets priced.

That's going to be close to how much you could spend on a few pints in the pub watching it on telly.

Money and lack of it, is at the root of many of the problems within the game at present.

I also think its wrong for fans to blame the RFL for THEIR clubs inability to generate income.
The money distributed by the RFL be it TV money or other income should be the icing on the cake, not clubs main source of income.

Sadly the sport of RL has become a sport with a few self sufficient clubs, and a large number of clubs surviving off RFL benefits. A few of these benefit clubs are wanting to move off their addiction, but for the vast majority, their appears to be little desire to progress.

^^^^^^^^^^
THIS

The figure of 10,000 average fans per game (that I keep repeating) is where the clubs need to be heading for.......at an average of £15 per ticket and £15 residual spend (beer/pies/merch) then the clubs will generate £3,900,000 in income before sponsorship (shirt/player/matchday). Then you have SkyTV putting in another £1,300,000....so your clubs are looking at a turnover of between £5,500,000 and maybe £8,000,000.....all on real income with no need for a "sugar daddy".....this is a sustainable sport, with room to grow.

All clubs with aspirations of being in SL come 2015 should be made to produce a quantifiable business plan,independently audited, as to how they will attempt to get to 10,000 fans and how long they think it will take them. None of this "it's a new stadium, fans will flock to us" or "we'll double the price of our ST's after a year or two cheapies" or my favourite..."we'llsign a few star names and the fans will flock in".....but proper, budgeted and realistic business plans.
The game can't rely on Sugar daddies.....HKA have lost theirs, London lose theirs soon and a few others are complaining....the game needs paying spectators or it will eventually revert back to a semi-pro comp with one or 2 full time teams.....
We know about Crusaders, Wakey and Bradford, together with Salfords near miss, but what the did London say to the Licencing guys last time out? We're on 3,380 average but will try to get it down to under 2k by next time around



Before anyone says "but you need a winning team"......you don't. What you need is a winning MARKETING team!

I'm sure Ian Lenegan was clueless until he attended one of the RFL's seminars.

If people aren't turning up to your seminars, maybe they're no good, or simply uninspiring.

You can market all you like, but if the underlying product just isn't interesting to enough people there's only so far you can go. For example, Sky televise netball. Millions have played it. A bit of marketing and it would attract 1000s right?

In the case of RL, we also suffer from it just not being 'interesting enough'. We who DO go think it is, obviously, but we can bang on to each other about how much we love going, but all we're doing then is preaching to the choir. We need to be honest and accept that for a variety of reasons, there are a lot of people, who, confronted with a ton of marketing for say London, will say, "what's the point? There's no star players, they mostly lose, and the games don't matter because they can't even go down. I like a bit of Rugby League, but there's a lot of other stuff to do on a weekend." We can get as frustrated as we like with that attitude ( and don't accuse me of having it, I drive 120 miles round trip to support my team ) but frustration acheives nothing. Realism does.

As you say, London's attendances have dropped. Ask those who've stopped going, why? Not enough marketing? Doubt it.

Don't get me wrong. You're right, there's NOT enough marketing, and when there is, it tends to be unfocused and generally poor. But even a complete transformation in marketing won't be nearly enough without structural change.

It does here and in Aussie.....and I should know, I market it





I get up at 3am to listen to Northern commentary of Londons away games.....I only started watching the team in 2002 so only witnessed 2 play-off games (losses) before moving here in 2009.....but attended games before then regardless of how they were.

I filled AWAY coaches (75 seats to WALES, 50 seater to Wakey) in 2009....the club ran FREE buses in 2006 and 2007 and couldn't fill any of them...why did people pay me in 2009? BECAUSE I MARKETED THEM....

We are all aware of Bradford's relatively recent problems but take a look back to when they first started playing in Superleague.

Opposing fans laughed at the music played, pitch announcements, mascots screaming around on beach buggies etc. But it worked: people came to see, especially families. They paid their entrance money, bought food, merchandise & lottery tickets, joined in with all the "fun" and contributing greatly to Bradford's coffers. And all this in a stadium that was hardly "state of the art".

What Bradford did do in the early days was to work hard at getting good news nearer the front of the newspapers than the back. Non-sports fans tend not to read anything on pages beyond the classified ads, so making sure news was printed at the front of the paper was paramount in attracting 'new' fans.

Print media is of course on the way out but the concept is still the same: get good news closer to the front than the back

Ian Lenegan doesnt think so. Nor Gary Hetherington. Nor McManus or Moran. These people regularly do turn up. Then again they arent strangely obsessed with Nigel Wood and his suits.

IT pains me to say this but I do agree with you we need to get rugby league talked about

Peter Deakin should have been snapped up by the RFL as their head of marketing at that time, to roll his vision and ideas out across the whole sport and not just one club. I think he was the one person within the game who could have achieved the necessary growth in the sport's profile and made SL a much bigger animal.

Great, more of that please. But it's not enough on its own to overcome the structural problems of a league with 8 teams in the playoffs and no relegation.

Apologies for repeating some of the points listed already.
Is this an idea that may have been established at HQ since the days of Lewis? if so are his previous plaudits misplaced?
Or is it that the ideas have come since his time ended from people who simply waited for him to go.
Have Barwick and the board simply felt that the existing system is unsatisfactory or needed to show they can be better? Is barwick too soon to the Greatest Game
I would like to see a list of those officials who put their name to these new ideas!
Who has been consulted or is the recent publicity part of the consultation process?
I assume clubs have already been consulted and if so who have been involved.
Just a comment - with very few exceptions the bottom four/top four two division suggestion would seem unworkable because of differing standards/funding/players.

When will the fans be consulted? We pay the bills after all!!!! If I dont like the outcomes SKY will be sacked and Premier sports will be purchased. I dont know if others will feel the same

What will be televised in future? I want to see at least the variety of teams that superleague has currently although perhaps the 12 teams proposed could work again.

I can see the support of championship clubs being gained because of P&R and I am sympathetic to some form of P&R. However, I support the increase in standards that has shown improvements in grounds - I dont want to settle for less!

Finally, I know the point has been made already, but I worry about overspending by a number of 2nd tier clubs leading to failure at promotion time and inevitable financial results.

Just read the last few pages of this thread and there are some brilliant posts which absolutely hit the nail on the head. The RFL actually does a pretty good promoting their end of the deal. I am forever bombarded with leaflets, letters, brochures etc in the post as well as emails. The other day I had a phone call from a bloke at Red Hall talking about offers for the Exiles game and World Cup.

Considering Warrington are owned by a promoter their marketing is dire and doesn't stretch beyond a poster stuck outside the ticket window for the next home game. No doubt it is the same at many other clubs. Contrast to Wigan and Leeds who really push the club. It is no coincidence that they are the two best supported sides in SL.

A club doesn't have to be winning every week, nor does every game have to feel like a final and be decided by a drop goal for us to get bums on seats. There are clubs in the soccer Premiership who have achieved absolutely nothing in my life time, yet still attract big crowds. I think a few club boards need to take a look at themselves and ask what they can do, rather than sit back and expect the RFL to run the show for them.

what a lot of poo, there is nothing wrong with the way it is now,of all the teams in the championship who would step up to replace anyone in sl no one is the answer fev,fax leigh just would not be able to cut it the support has gone to other clubs. we need to face facts we have only gone half way to the aussie model we need to go the whole way. new teams should be elected to join sl and then given 3 years to prepare for entry go from part time to full time,get finance/sponsers in place build their support up all with the help of the rl yoyo teams does not work P&R does not work in RL, it never has in the pro era and never will. this idea we are being given now will distroy at least 2 maybe 4 clubs just so the likes of leeds wigan etal can have a bigger cut of the cash.

Disagree. I can't imagine that Peter Deakin would have been better for the game at Red Hall than he was at Odsal.

SLE are responsible for marketing the competition - which is an entirely seperate remit to getting people through the gates at Headingley, Craven Park or Odsal in my view. The clubs should be making the job SLE / RFL easier, rather than sitting back and letting them take the flack.

The 14 Super League clubs are indivudial businesses. They're free to employ who they want, where they want and they have the same access to resources as every other club (in sofar as they are recruiting from the exact same job pool).

The only people who should be responsible for marketing the clubs are the clubs themselves. They're free to buy their own media, set their own prices and tailor their marketing to their own local audiences. The people who should be accountable for failing crowds or clubs struggling to make ends meet are the clubs themselves, not the RFL, and to say that the RFL should do "something" about failings at an individual club is letting the most culpable people off the hook. If those clubs could grow their crowds (both in terms of quantity and quality) and their revenue, the RFL / SLE job of finding commercial partners is a hell of a lot easier.

Anyone with an interest in marketing may have come across [url=http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread.htmlSeth Godin's idea of 'purple cows'[/url. It's a principle that to make your business and your marketing work, you have to do something remarkable and if you don't, you just look like every other boring cow that's grazing in the field. It's not a new idea or theory, but it's a good analogy.

That's exactly what Bradford did. They created and marketed a matchday experience that had never been seen in the UK before (let's ignore the debate about 'stealing Cougarmania' for a second). They turned a "turn up for an hour and a half" event into an all-day family event with colour, light and music. They created a 'purple cow'.

The problem with these ideas is that suddenly, everyone is doing them and, when every cow in the field is purple, they all just look boring again. Unfortunately, nobody at any club has come up with that next 'remarkable' idea, other than mass discounts. They're playing it safe and as a result, nobody is talking about RL any more (at least, not positively).

Exactly. Some fans, and sadly some people within the game seem to have got it in to their heads that if only there was P+R, if only the play-off structure changed, if only the person who was in charge wore a nicer suit everything would fall in to place. Its stupid.

Get out and sell your bloody clubs, stop waiting on a silver bullet and stop blaming the RFL.

1 - 4 different divisions of 10 teams

2 - Alter the salary cap in each division to suit every team's capability to afford the full cap in that division

This may mean having the ability to increase the salary cap in the top league to keep the higher quality players from exiting the league towards Union/NRL.

This may also mean the teams who now play in Super League that will go down to the 2nd division that are now operating at full cap will have to lose a few of their better players to the top division. This will make for a better top division.

3 - Top 4 playoffs for each division, 1 v 4, 2 v 3 then the final of the winners.

Simplicity towards the end of the year will put emphasis on the playoffs as the most important part of the season, fans will no longer be dissilusioned with the playoff structure, and will be more likey to attend them accordingly.

4 - Season passes to accommodate the semi-finals, but not the finals considering they already sell tickets convincingly.

Fans will have an even greater incentive to attend the semi-finals, and treat the playoffs as the most important part of the season.

5 - The RFL should assess the salary cap differences from division to division, the team who wins their division should then go under a review of their finances to see if they're eligible to be promoted. The bottom team of each division should be relegated depending on the decision made after the financial review of the promoted team below.

6 - Games from the top two divisions should be televised to make up the lost revenue from Super League not having its overly-elaborate playoff structure anymore.

7 - Also, more representative games to fill the spaces left in the calender that should be treated as competition for places in the England team.

That should do it.

False dichotomy. Look it up, or ask your teacher to explain.

Given the gulf between our salary cap and the Aussie cap, raising our cap to within affordable limits for UK clubs wouldn't prevent our talent going down under. So when that fails, what next: maybe we could build a beach with heatlamps and wave machines to replicate the surfing experience? So forget raising the cap to make our game more attractive.

Fiddling around (again) with league structures won't do anything to make the game more attractive either and some of the proposals will be so confusing as to put many people off the game anyway. It's difficult enough trying to explain the current playoff system.

Why? Do you need someone to explain what one is to you? Because that clearly isn’t a dichotomy of any type, never mind a false one.

Maybe ‘learning what things are before I try and use them’ could be a SMART objective for you?