Wondered how long it would be before the local troll turned up


Funny how Superleague fans who have watched team be mismanaged for years believe its so hard.

you know what I mean, of course they will try and be competitive, but they dont need to try and win SL in one season.

Next you will be telling me that having a 3 year franchise is better because in your first season you dont have to spend like mad to stay in the league and you can build gradually - oh wait .....

i wonder if anybody told widnes that. it is obviously better and in 5 years all the championship clubs will be ed because they don't have a fair footing and can't gain promotion bar the odd cases. not mentioning the yo-yoing of average players.

yeah like Widnes, Like Salford, Like Les Catalans.

My team makes a profit, has won numerous titles with a squad built around young local players it developed, it owns its own stadium and has an average attendance larger than the entire village of Featherstone.

They arent mismanaged. They are managed very very well.

Your problem is that you need to believe that the worst of Super League is representative of the whole of Super League. It isnt. Being better than our worst, will not get you close to the likes of Widnes or Salford next year, never mind the likes of Les Catalans, Huddersfield, Leeds, Wigan, Saints, Warrington, Hull, Hull KR.

Featherstone first team now would probably have 20 points put on them by Leeds or Wigans 2nd team.

We have already seen the likes of Hardman, Briggs, Moore, James, Ellis, Crossley, Sharp, Dale, Saxton at SL level and they weren’t up to scratch. And these aren’t your Amor’s your Walmsley’s your Hill’s who were young and dropped out and came back a bit more mature. These are players at their peak and older. Fev's squad is probably at least 15 players away from being a competitive SL squad.

lol yeah leads are doing well and so is the fev contingent leeds dont have an average crowd of 18000. While on the subject of population then Fevs attendance per population is miles better than leeds



At least with the new system if a team does go up they will be worthy of it. Widnes the season they went up lost by an aggregate of over 90 points to fev. they had much more to make up to be competitive than a team winning it from 2015 will have to do.

Leeds are well managed currently another 13 teams in superleage, not all are well managed like leeds

End of the day I will wait and see, Im not gonna start using speculation and opinion as facts like you always do

Fev dont have population of 18k, its 15244 at the last census. Leeds average attendance is more than 15k.

You can have your attendance per population, take it to the bank, see if you get more money for it. I think you will find you wont.

And Widnes had the time to turn things round and create the team we are seeing now. Which is now in its third year.

Widnes, despite having months to prepare, despite having years to get their infrastructure sorted and everything in place still finished bottom in their first year. The new system gives clubs less time to prepare, less time to get things sorted, and only one year to finish outside the bottom 4 to stay up,.

Not all are you are right. But bar one or two, all are closer to being managed as well as Leeds than as badly as Bradford.

are you sure?

Do they also pay the extra to make up the difference which is the only way an average would matter? don't think so.

Widnes was worthy of it and the past 2 seasons prove it, they have the structure for super league majority of championship clubs don't. Any club can be made into a decent team.

Yes and those clubs that wasn't well managed should have lost the license and been replaced correctly, it was the RFL that failed not franchising but they made the right decision in choosing Widnes.

Fev could be better than Leigh all season and if Leigh finish 2nd and fev 1st it then matter who signs the best of an average bunch because 3 months isn't long enough.

Several clubs failed in the short period that we had a licensed league,twist and squirm all you want,thats whats happened.

If bradford & Wakefield had been relegated out of the licensed league when they went into"what should have been"unacceptable financial meltdown,we would still have licensing now.

Instead we now have the same clubs being given 400k from the 2017 tv deal just to prop them up some more

Neither Bradford nor Wakefield have finished in a relegation place

Ah I thought this had all been put to bed months ago.

I see it was just a matter of the protesters bidding their time.

I know why don't we let the SL chairmen vote on it!!!!!

Oh they did?

Well lets dump the democratic idea and have one overlord to make all the decisions, what they had that too years ago and dumped that idea.

I dunno, people wanting to make up their own minds, it will never work.

So what

So P+R would have neither solved nor addressed the situations at Bradford or Wakefield, The system we have in place is irrelevant to their failure which was solely down to bad management.

It worked for my club. It allowed us to spend money on our ground and our jnr system rather than spending it all on first team for fear of relegation.

Why you talking to me about P&R.
I said two clubs bradford and wakefield should have been relegated out of the licensed league when they went into administration
Its irrelavent to me whether clubs replaced them or not

Im saying that whatever system we have, the issues at Bradford and Wakefield would be apparent, and they wouldnt have been solved by simply relegating them.

Don’t take any notice fevfan. And don’t let him tell you Leeds is well managed....

Leeds has, relatively speaking, been a let down to the game of RL. With its potential in the game, Leeds Rhinos should now have a ground with a bigger capacity, better facilities and a bigger average crowd.

It was said above that the Leeds team owns its own ground. But he told us previously that Headingley is owned by a guy called Paul Caddick. A guy whose first love is RU. He runs a pro RU club out of Headingley. And I guess you don’t need a bigger ground for that!

We were also told that Leeds Rhinos makes a profit of about £600k a year. They shouldn’t do that – they should spend that money on developing Leeds Rhinos – and just aim to break even each year. Note though, that in the RFL rules, Leeds Rhinos is the only member club that’s listed has having TWO owning companies – Leeds Cricket, Football and Athletic Club Ltd and Leeds Rugby Ltd!! I hope the £600k a year that rugby league is said to make isn’t siphoned off to help prop up Leeds’ RU club!

Franchising all but killed off the game in the pyramid below the top 8 clubs. Amazingly though, there are still some strong clubs in the 2nd tier. Once the new structure is up and running, just watch the whole game go year on year!

Leeds should jack in the RU distraction and concentrate on rugby league like Featherstone (a club that really does own its own ground) does.

What makes me laugh is how certain fans of SL teams on here keep contradicting themselves. They claim the licensing system was good because teams could come up and build steady without having to worry about relegation.

Yet say its wrong that championship team in the new structure if promoted shouldn't just look to build gradually and build a team int he first season capable of remaining int he top four of the 8 after the split.

There's no difference to me other than the team getting promoted has actually already got a team capable of competing with the bottom half of SL because they have just proved it. rather than a team with a rich backer and nice rented ground getting promoted from sixth place.

its not that said team shouldnt build gradually, its more that they cant. Its also that it means that the money the promoted team receives has to go straight in to the first team, every thing else, for ever more takes a clear 2nd place.

Featherstone have many hurdles to overcome before being anywhere near sustainable and competitive in SL. Their academy, their stadium, their fan base, the commercial and merchandising operation would all need massive improvements. It is infinitely more difficult for them to do that when the focus of the club is entirely on not finishing in the bottom 4.

of course they can. teams can theoretically go from 100k to 550k to 1.8m funding, seems more gradual than 100k to 1.2m as before. It's all up to the people running clubs, not the structure

and they go from competing with clubs spending next to nothing, to competing with clubs spending £1.8m (while they are still on £550k funding) to clubs spending even more.

The jump between the bottom of the 2nd tier and the top of the top tier is as big, if not bigger, under this funding/salary cap structure, with the added instability of a bad run of 8 games could see your funding drop by £1.3m (which is about what SL clubs get right now in TV funding) and the accompanying massive scaling back that would make necessary.

This structure will bring clubs like Fev closer to the bottom SL clubs, but it will take the bottom SL clubs much much further away from the top SL clubs which would leave us with that massive disparity where Fev or Leigh's sole focus is putting together a side to win 5 of the last 8.

It makes any blooding of youngsters, any investment in infrastructure entirely secondary, as no risk with the £1.8m could be taken meaning we just see huge numbers of average overseas and spent players filling out bottom squads, and if a club were relegated, the little they did focus on infrastructure and youth development would be redeployed to getting back up and covering the £1.3m less funding.

Winning 5 of the last 8 doesnt sound much different to winning the last 3/4 games as Leeds have done recently, with any play off system you could say much of the regular season is pointless

Oh and by the way, where did Chris Hill drop down from? , before going back to SL?

We might have if the RFL had thrown shedloads of development cash into those places as they did in Bridgend

And I've just filled in the missing ' history '

No you couldnt, the season+play-offs work entirely differently to a structure where the first 22 rounds are completely and utterly disregarded and a new 8 game season started.

the 'history' you have added isnt 'missing' its just entirely wrong.