Why are London Broncos 'a joke of a club?'. They have produced many quality players who have gone on to greater success with other SL clubs, despite having to cope with moving stadium every few years due to factors beyond their control. They enjoyed decent crowds for a good many of their years, even if the numbers have been down in more recent seasons. Their small band of supporters is passionate and don't deserve to be patronised for standing by their club. Finally, if your team faced a 400 mile round-trip for every away game I'm pretty sure that the number of fans folllowing them away would be severely tested.

Promotion and relegation between them would be essential, as would minimum player salary spend. The fundamental difference between what we have now is that all 20 would be FT and forced to spend a minimum of say £1.5m in tier 2 and £2m in tier 1 - that would make the gap too much for most championship clubs surviving on 1200 gates or less without a rich owner.
Licences would be 3 years and the objective would be to expand not stay still, allowing the clear platform for cashed up expansion or heartlands clubs to realise ambition whilst protecting a sound business from going PT in the Championships
Basically if Batley can show they have the ability and infrastructure to finance their ambition then the sport should encourage that, same with Montreal or Detroit

£10,000 is actually 0.22% of £4.5m. So, your statement around .000000022% is 100,000,000% wrong. I get what you're saying, but on the same basis, a crowd of 10,000 would only equate to 4.4% of the required income as well.

Looked at another way, 500 additional away fans means an additional 5% revenue from spectators, or closer to 10% if you're Salford, Hudderfield, Widnes or Wakefield.

It's easy to manipulate statistics...

It was just to annoy 'Call Me God'.

Therefore, you want to water down the quality of the top flight (SL1) to "prop up" the second tier (SL2)


What you want could be easily achieved now, just by spreading the Sky monies between more clubs.

The key is to find a way of getting more cash out of the sports primary sponsor and therein lies the million dollar question ??

As I said previously SL 1 & SL 2 cannot work, unless they are conferences, with some kind of play off system towards the end of the season.
RL is just so far behind Union or NRL that diluting the resources further, would just increase the "brain drain" either to Aus or Union.

The bald fact is that RL in it's present form, RL is just not attractive enough to generate the cash that it thinks it needs.
Perhaps we could expand into N. America, that might get a few more quid

Conferences are the way to grow the number of pro clubs. SL1/SL2 is just another name for what we have now. Clubs will be doing their damnedest to avoid playing in SL2 and the best players will naturally gravitate to SL1.

Have 1 top flight division and add to the league as and when clubs (both traditional and new) feel and can demonstrate they are ready. Have a lead in period so they can prepare. They key is the conferences have equal standing.

Fag packet structure - Start with 16 teams now, split into 2 conferences, home and away fixtures. Top and bottom half of each join up and form the second half of the season playing other once. Top half play for title, bottom half for a shield type trophy. Play off system at the end to suit.

Could we not have 2 leagues playing side by side rather than league 1 and 2.

Apologies: too subtle for me, 'twould appear. I have a 'soft spot' for the Broncos as I was living in London when they started in 1981, allowing me a rugby league fix once a fortnight after eight years with only the odd trip home to Warrington to see the sport live.

You mean conferences ?

Unless there is additional funding or, SL clubs reduce their share of the Sky revenue OR, The Championship negotiate a seperate TV deal, things will have to stay pretty much as they are.
IF there was some major additional TV deal from N. America, which, as things stand, would be unlikely, why are we changing the League format again, so soon after the current system was implemented.
There seems to be only one potential answer, which would be to include Toronto and/or Toulouse and IF this is the reason, there seems little sense in the change, without protecting them as one or both could be relegated in their first season.
Btw, I'm not saying that this would be right, only that it seems the only reason to have a major change.

0.0000002% income v 36% income........I'd let a few more than Blackpool rot for the good of the game.

It's illegal to carry more than 5 passengers in a Hackney Carriage so you must be referring to a play off match



London Broncos are a tarnished brand that should never see the light of SL again IMHO.........the reasons are many and complex....far too complex for you as it would involve venturing beyond the range of your bus-pass!

Your stats are flawed - read my earlier post.

Btw, the requirements for a hackney carriage are to "be of sufficient seating capacity to carry a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 8 passengers".

You would expect the French and American clubs to secure their own deal and tip into the pot to cover travel costs. Conferences cannot work.

At least you know where I am from, unlike you who thinks he is from France when in actual fact is from the urban slums in Lancashire.


Intellectually challenged???? Please feel free to tell everyone here my education qualifications....

You will be surprised by my CV.

But in your language John from Chorley , have a set of balls and Inhofe from the revolting person a you have created..

Nobody likes you here, you haven't grasped that yet

If all we can expect is some help with travel costs, then there is little point in the inclusion of either French or N. American clubs.
However, if their inclusion allowed an increase in funding, either to be spread among the SL clubs or to the wider RL family, then , it becomes worthwhile.
Why would 2 x 10 club conferences, with the top 4 of each making up an end of season play off, not work ?
If it was an East / West split, it would certainly help with Thursday / Friday evening travel (apart from the French /N. American fixtures and it would breathe some new lif into some of the challenge cup fixtures, when say Wigan or Saints played Cas or Leeds etc, as the fixtures would have some "rarity" value.

Conferences would certainly be preferable to SL1 & SL2

Conference set-ups, where you play your own Conference H&A, and the other Conference H OR Away, would possibly work.

As a fan of a Yorkshire team, I wouldn't want my team missing out on scheduled games against the likes of Wigan, Saints and Wire.

Widnes can right off though.

The alternative of a possible top flight including 3/4 N. American clubs and 2 French clubs, will leave room for maybe 6 British clubs and you dont have to be a rocket scientist to work out who they will be.
The possible irony of Cas and Wakefield eventually playing in new grounds, whilst having been effectively demoted, is a very strong possibility and the same would apply to Widnes, KR, Salford, Huddersfield and as said previously, this would kill the game in the UK.

Country wide conferences is the way forward. 12 in the UDI Yorkshire conference then, which should suit the traditionalists:

KR Hull (the agreed merger of Hull and KR to form one club), Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Castleford, Featherstone, Batley, Hunslet, Doncaster and York.

And 12 in the in Tuther Area conference:

Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, St Helens, Salford, Leigh, Swinton, Oldham, Rochdale, Workington, Whitehaven and Barrow.

That should suit most. However as it’s conferences playing we can have more with the play offs afterwards. So the third conference is the Not on my Bus Pass Conference:

Toronto, Catalan, Toulouse, Newcastle, North Wales, South Wales, London Skolars, London Broncos, Bristol, Coventry, Hemel A (Dewsbury), Hemel B (Hemel).

The futures bright if rather aimless.

The current SL clubs would never agree to a conference setup, as the TV money would then be spread across 20 teams rather than the current 12.

I think we all agree that we need to get some more money into the game, and tbh it's not going to be via paying fans. Maybe to a degree for individual clubs, but not collectively across the board. We can't attract major sponsors, and we can't pretend that RL will suddenly become so popular a spectator sport that this will ever happen. So, that leaves TV deals.

Sky have the monopoly in the UK, albeit Premier have dabbled but I doubt they have mega money to contribute. The game has some history in France, but surely a domestic league (rather than just one or two teams playing in an English league) would attract more TV sponsorship? Ditto for USA and Canada (without the history). The major TV companies there aren't going to be interested in a couple of teams playing in a European competition.

The key for me is that we need to find a way of making the game attractive to watch, as well as having worthwhile competitive leagues. We can't make wholesale changes to the rules of the game (unless we want to divorce ourselves from world RL), but (imo) it would make sense to give more funding to teams at the bottom of SL (and any promoted teams) to help level out playing standards.

From a TV perspective, it makes no difference whether the teams playing are from major cities or a small town in Yorkshire. What matters is having competitive games where the outcome isn't pretty much known beforehand.

Will it happen? No chance. But what I still can't comprehend is what the "master plan" is for RL in the UK/Europe/Northern Hemisphere? The easy answer to that is "there isn't one", but whatever we think of the Red Hall team, they must have some thoughts for how this is all going to pan out. Or don't they???

i stopped reading your post after that!

Well two fully professional clubs in a major city can’t afford an academy team each? It’s only a matter of time. FC have a history of mergers on the east coast...

oh dear!

the merged academy is down to lack of players coming through from junior level, the talent pool is getting smaller across the game, not just in hull, but we still have an academy under the COH banner, some clubs dont even have their own!

you'd be happy to risk losing nearly 20,000 fans from game? hell, why not merge widnes and saints too, same distance and time to get to each ground as it is fc and kr!

Oh dear, glad your concentrating on the small local point not the bigger picture, Rugby League to a tee. And isn’t the lack of juniors coming through a telling state of the game. Doesn’t matter how many fans you have if no juniors are playing the game.

And the 14 teams for 2019 are (not all with an academy):

Wigan
Warrington
Widnes
St Helens
Castleford
Leeds
Hull
KR
Leigh
Salford
Wakefield
Toronto
Leigh
Catalan

im actually pro expansion, as long as it is done right

any new team wanting to join from north america/france should only be allowed if they have a tv deal that contributes to the whole game, not just their club and foundations layed in place for junior develpoment

two teams that have an audience of 20,000 shouldn't be dismissed simply because of location! yet you'd rather keep at least 3 clubs who wouldnt get that many combined!

and no huddersfield???

Well Leigh in there twice, not much difference is there. Let’s hope Leigh being promoted at the end of this year bring their own TV deal. Did KR expand the TV deal?