No different to now, some teams play each other 4 times already.

So, pray tell me how clubs sell such for cup and play off games?

Out of interest, which chairmen do you think would vote to cut their club's income from the existing TV deal by c14%?

Cup & play-offs don't equal 25% of the league fixture list!

That's 25% of your saleble product whic is unknown until 2 weeks before it happens.

I'm not advocating any cut in income from the TV deal, quite the contrary.
Since the inclusion of Toronto (and Toulouse) we've been hearing about how much they will bring to the game in both advertising, sponsorship and TV revenue. Now, either this wasnt true or we have the opportunity to renegotiate the Sky deal.
I know there is still time before the current deal expires but, this didn't stop us extending the last deal (before it expired) and nor should it now.
It's time for those who run the sport to earn their overblown salaries and get back to the negotiating table, with all of the possibilities that an additional club in France and a "new" club in North America bring to the sport and gain a decent increase in the TV deal.
I konw that it wont happen, primarily because we've been sold yet another pup but, it bloody well should.

Poor sales people always have excuses for missing targets whilst sales leaders just get on with the job of selling. If we take Wigan as an example, on Wednesday August 1st, they had 9 days to sell the first home 8's game, v Castleford on the Friday night.

Firstly, This event, regardless of the exact details, was a known occurrence regardless of it it were a home or away fixture in the super8's or Qualifiers, so it wasn't a shock to the club or their fans.....holidays would be booked regardless.
Secondly. Wigan are one of the best supported sides in SL and on Friday, April 20th 11,866 fans watched them host Castleford in the regular season. Wigan will have all the contact details for the vast majority of those fans as well as the details of previous purchasers of tickets across the last few seasons. How hard is it to send an email/SMS or employ a tele-canvasing company? A mailshot would take 2 hours to build and could have seen 10,000+ envelopes hit doormats inside 2 days. I don't know if they did any marketing or not, but they got 10,293 fans for the fist 8's game.
They then has 4 weeks until the visit of Wakefield......where they delivered their first sub 10k gate in eons....

...it is too easy to blame the "notice period" for poor crowds, when the reality is that most SL clubs have struggled this year and over the last few seasons. It really shouldn't be difficult to sell the visit of the 2017 Grand Finalists.....let alone the visit of Wire this Friday (with 5 weeks notice) who had 13,249 in attendance in July....but as I say, excuses are what bad sales people deliver, not results.

I haven't argued otherwise. I have pointed out that we already have them and that they have an affect on the marketability of the club/games.

I believe Michael Carter when he says this, despite agreeing with much of your post - I would go to watch Wakey if they announced a game tomorrow, at midnight, in Bristol.

OK, maybe not Bristol, but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the game does not have enough tragics' like me (and probably most on here), to sustain an unpredictable structure.

If we are a dying breed, then switching the system is akin to swapping deckchairs on the Titanic. Wringing more cash out of a shrinking fan base is never going to be the answer......
....I am aware that Turkeys don't often vote for Christmas, but I genuinely see a need for a 14 side competition, with 13 home games and a top 5 play-off as being the best way to give clubs stability and a pathway to improve. Getting the SL chairmen to take the hit o their SKY income would be the initial problem, but if a club needs 150,000 fans through the doors to function, then they at least know that 11,500 is the average attendance they need to achieve, but with the threat of relegation, not many clubs will spend their money o anything else other than survival, so Licencing raises its head again.....we are in a cycle of half baked changes with nothing ever given time to bed in and as soon as the SL Chairman realise that Leeds v Wigan 4 times a year isn't the silver bullet, they'll be back to change it all again.

Excuses for laziness and incompetence, and only the first game is 2 weeks after the fixtures are announced.

Lenagan's latest blames everyone but himself and it would be a gross understatement to say that he 'bends the truth' with his selective use of statistics.

No-one can seriously call Michael Carter lazy or incompetent.

I agree about Lenagan though.

He says the game hasn't developed for a decade, but fails to acknowledge that he has been one of those with a controlling influence in the game, throughout that period.

If the game has stagnated, it's at least partly down to him!

No it's not. A team's first home game of the 8's might only have 2 weeks to sell but the other home games have longer upwards to potentially 8 weeks.

8's fixtures announced 1st August, last home fixture for clubs either 7 or 8 weeks later. So only one fixture falls under the 2 weeks to sell criticism, not 25% of games.

Ok, 25% of the fixtures are not known as the season launch.

Happy now?

The point stands - certainty and stability is needed.

That in itself is not the answer to the games issues though.

Nonsense. Between the announcement of the 'split' fixtures, clubs will have anywhere between eight and eighteen days till their first home game. Any club that says that they cannot possibly market an event in 8-18 days is, quite frankly, pathetic and deserves every financial difficulty that comes their way.

Agreed. This is the same Lenagan who took a Super League game to Millwall the other season but took a Super 8's game and only announced it at the end of July for a fixture taking place 6 weeks later.

Could've easily taken a regular season game there in May/June and had 6 months to sell it. He's hardly in a position to criticise planning of short notice fixtures.

It's the 11 SL chairmen you are calling out.

It is they who are saying this.

You think you know better than them?

Or are they simply lying about it, with an ulterior motive?

spot on!
Wigan have 4 home games to boost their income after the 11 regular season games. The plan of how and when to market these games should have been laid back in February if not earlier.....4 EVENT games with themes.....tickets sold to their loyal home fans months in advance. The idea that they waited until August 1st before doing anything is absurd

I'm saying that I agree with Hetherington, the man in charge of one of the few commercially successful clubs of either code in the country, when he says that some SL chairmen are using the structure as a convenient excuse for their own poor commercial performance.

Marketing a game of rugby in 8-18 days is not hard. You just have to do it properly and, unfortunately, that's where too many RL clubs fail.

Not lying per say but making excuses. Yes it will be tougher to sell a game in 2 weeks than one you’ve had several months to do....but you just work harder at it instead of giving up saying it’s impossible. If their team falls short of winning a GF or reaching the playoffs do they just give up or do they look at ways to do better next season? Why not take this approach when trying to sell 8’s tickets instead of selling it as an impossible job.

I don't disagree the point they make, but their solution doesn't solve it. Michael Carter (or even Eddie Hearn) would be able to market Wakey V Hudds for the 7th time in one year.

Even if we give the clubs the benefit of the doubt, when the likes of Carter make arguments like their corporate hospitality revenues are falling or that its hard to sell corporate packages because of the eights, he's confusing correlation with causation.

Is the reason why Wakefield's corporate hospitality revenues are down (assuming that inference is correct) really because of the 8s, or is it because that the club's idea of corporate hospitality, in the year 2018, is cramming people into.a Benidorm apartment block?

Have you been in hospitality at Wakefield Bramley?

Admittedly it was a few years ago, but yes. And despite the efforts of the staff there, it was nothing special.

The point I'm making is that, particularly in an area like corporate hospitality which changes a lot, is there honestly a club out there that can say they are fully meeting the needs of the market? If they can, then pinning the blame on poor sales on the 8s has a little (but not much) credence. But I don't think many clubs can say that. In fact, I suspect most a a long way behind what is being offered elsewhere.

To sort of prove the point, if you Google the phrase "Wakefield Trinity Hospitality", the top two results are one for the Widnes Vikings site and one for hospitality at Wakefield for 2017 - I'd suggest those were a much bigger reason for the clubs poor hospitality sales than only having 16 days between the S8 fixtures being announced and your first home game.

I think you're missing a massive point and that the clubs don't know on what day/date, people have lives outside of RL and as a Season Ticket holder it is ridiculous that you don't know on what day 7 of your included fixtures will be. It's not about a clubs lack of ability to market the games its a ridiculous situation for them to be in.

It's ridiculous to ask a club to sell Season Tickets when you can't tell them when 7 games that are included in that are going to be

Season tickets are only one part of the equation; they're a foundation upon which to build. Are you telling me that 16 days isn't long enough to try and attract and grow the more casual crowd? As CMG said, clubs know they have these 3-4 games to slot into the calendar - it's not hard to come up with 3-4 event-specific campaigns.

The fact that one club that's part of the "junta" can't manage to appear in Google for a simple query about their hospitality packages for this season suggests that it IS a lack or marketing ability at fault here, not the S8s.