"We" as in "Rugby League, the whole sport".

It's a well-known phenomenon that people attribute their own values to other people: crooks think everyone else is crooked, sociopaths think everyone else is a sociopath.

In rugby league, you'll never get a clearer example of this than supporters of clubs who would rather see the entire sport cease to exist than their own club be denied the chance to hoover some crumbs from the table for a few more months, accusing those whose interests are the game as a whole of thinking similarly.

None of us are alright, Jack. And one reason we're not is because we have a large number of 'supporters' whose support is limited strictly to their own club, even if that harms the entire game. There was never a more depressing thread on this website than the one before the World Cup which asked people whether they prioritised club or country. The number of people who couldn't see how the national team's success is so much more important that their own club was staggering.

Fax aren't ready for SL, and they openly state that. However, with a new Chairman at the helm, they do have ambitions and the crux of the matter is that they shouldn't be prevented from elevating themselves if and when they're ready, both on and off the field.

Btw, Bradford aren't "one of our biggest clubs" now. Just like Fax, they find themselves in a lower division and they need to live with that.

You say "London, Catalans, Toulouse, Toronto, Bradford, would all be able to contribute to SL, but will be unable to get past Leigh, Hull KR, Widnes, Wakefield and Salford who don't offer as much potential in Super League, but have the advantages of established position at championship level".

London, of course, have been a SL team and are pretty established in the Championship now. Bradford, ditto, but went into freefall.

Widnes, Wakefield and Salford established at championship level? They're still in SL last time I looked!

Catalans have indeed established themselves as a credible SL team, and whilst Toulouse and Toronto may have potential, they still have to prove themselves.

RL is a great sport to watch, but needs a competitive edge for all clubs involved to make it have some meaning for the fans. Clubs need to have enough income coming in to pay their players and other expenses, but this doesn't have to mean selling our soul.

You can replace 'moan' with 'leave', I think. SL is not a prison and those unprotected clubs have options. They might not be good options, but they're better than that.




We could save a lot of time and money by not even having first team squads and games. Just hand out trophies based on an RFL assessment of facilities.

I too am unsure of the worth of Toronto or French teams in a UK comp, but if you are as happy as you say with "bus-pass" accessible top flight RL, then don't be surprised when SKY eventually decide that their 18 million a year can be better spent elsewhere, because darts out rates us now and the fans at Darts on a Thursday night can't be counted on the fingers and toes of one bloke......

"Bus pass"? I want promotion and relegation. Just like most major comps in a lot of sports. No more, no less. What I don't want is someone in an office sat with a pen deciding which clubs should or shouldn't be in a league to make way for a vanity project in another country that doesn't offer anything to the English league.

P.s you're quoting teams that won the league. I'm talking about teams that challenged or broke the mould. Like how there is a top 6 clubs that have any chance of Champions League qualification on football and the rest have no chance and may as well just make up the numbers. I know you probably already knew that - it just didn't fit your agenda.

The semi-wealthy blokes toy thing is proving my point. That's what I'm talking about. You're right. It isn't a sustainable way to run a club - which is why it boggles my mind when you have a club like Wakefield sustaining itself without a big money backer yet implying they should be sacrificed for a club with a big money backer - one who has no ties to the country the league is based in. Way to respect the folks who have supported their club through thick and thin, mind.

...a round trip journey from Salford, to Wigan, to St Helens, to Widnes, to Warrington and then back to Salford is 60 miles.....it's just proof that we are a regional sport and why, IN MY OPINION, we struggle for fans, sponsors and media attention. Given the population of the 5 towns above is about 1,000,000 then the collective average attendance for 2017 of 9k is poor given that there were at least 10 derby games where the furthest travel was in fact a 50 mile round trip......


Major League Baseball/NFL/NHL/NBL/AFL/IPL.....hell even our own NRL all seem to flourish with no trap door......football has the sheer numbers of players, fans and sponsors that they can afford to lose teams or have them yoyo....our game doesn't have that level of wealth to sustain it.




I've heard nearly 2 decades of such claims regarding London......because London didn't immediately start producing players we were a waste......then we started to produce them, shipping them north...then licensing ended.....and the talented youth in the south went back to Union. North America is awash with athletic young men who will have just missed out on pro or college football.....I'd say that Toronto, once inside a protected league would be producing star players inside a decade (if given the time).....


No agenda here......I simply posted a list of the finals of the comp over its lifetime to underline the fact that we have a top 3 that used to be top 4....with the occasional appearance of a team having a good season.....Warrington 3 times the bridesmaid with Hull and the Tigers once each....the rest was and is the same 4 teams....5 out of 40 slots shows an 87.5% dominance of a big 4......and challenging means winning the thing or coming close, not finishing 5th or lower!



If we want the game to grow, then I am sorry to say that the answer isn't Wakefield. It isn't Wakefield in a new stadium either

...nor is it Castleford in a new stadium.......it might be Wakefield and Castleford sharing a new stadium though and it in all probability would definitely be a merged club playing in a 20k seater stadium.........but nope, because folk have shook a bucket and stood on icy terraces for 40 years, then we must resist progress at all costs......change is a bad thing to some folk and as such, I believe we will continue to struggle along with poor crowd playing crap stadiums until the last of our fan-base is dead....Wakefield v Castleford in 2017 regular season averaged 8,500 over the 2 rounds.....deciding to turn away an opportunity such as Toronto to "defend" what is a 4th division football attendance is as narrow a minded stance as I've ever witnessed...

Let's get rid of most M62 CLUBS, they are pointless....Jeez, there are some proper expansion moron's on here. (obviously they don't include their own club, if they have one !) HYPOCRITES

I stand by my earlier conclusion...

Just seeing how far this is going to go (Mars v Earth)

Big shout there sparky......care to back up what featherstone, halifax, dewsbury bring to the table that they haven't already in 125 years?

I have no interest in London, Toronto or a team from Mars replacing wakefield or Leigh just so long as you're happy with tin-pot TV money, tin-pot sponsors and not a pot to pi55 in for anything else......let's revert back to the way it was....a la BREXIT RL STYLE.........and now Mickey Mouse owns Sky......well, we've found outr home!

I like you, you have a good sense of humour

It's a false dilemma to think we have to choose between the game thriving in the heartlands and expansion - these things are not mutually exclusive. Also expansion doesn't mean replacement.

Who needs planet earth when you've got the town teams of Wigan & St Helens to push the sport to new heights

Yet when I suggest a compromise, which encourages expansion whilst offering a route into SL via on field success, you advocate leaving the league?

Didn't realise that regarding Toulouse's stadium. That would clearly need sorting out. Do they have plans in place? I'm less worried about the crowds as one could reasonably expect them to greatly increase if they were playing in Super League.

I'm not saying those two sides are currently running an academy in the lower leagues, I'm saying I'd make it a condition if they were to be put into SL and granted exemption from relegation. They need to be developing new players rather than relying on those produced by heartlands clubs. Same regarding Toronto's crowds, if they dropped off then I'd no longer protect them from relegation. I can't see that happening though given that they have been getting such good numbers in their first season in a division which generally gets a few hundred on.

This is absolutely right.

Rugby League has to adapt to the commercial realities of modern sport, and that starts with taking a cold, hard look at exactly what we offer potential commercial partners and broadcasters.

Major sponsors don't want to pay money to reach the sorts of audiences that we offer. Those that do want to reach those audiences, can do so much more cheaply and much more effectively than through the medium of sports sponsorship.

When marketers at the sorts of brands that we want and need to be attracting look at demographic data, they look at things household income, they look at employment, they look at consumer spending power, they look at educational attainment, they look at average age, they look at health standards and they look at job quality.

On most if not all of those measurements, most of the towns that make up much of RL land don't tick those boxes. We have no right to complain that we only attract online bookies, payday loan firms and tinned mushy peas as sponsors when we insist that the future of this sport lies in small northern towns where the High Streets are made up of bookmarkets, pawnbrokers and fast food takeaways.

We've really got two options. Either we find new audiences that are going to keep this sport alive (and in that case, it's incumbent on every club that is making a case to be in Super League to explain how they plan to do that), or we can continue this slow and painful death.

I'm as excited as anyone (if you see it as a positive) with the North American sides entering the UK competition but believe there are potentially some serious issues with obtaining insurance for USA sides (as a result of the NFL head injury claims). Canada was a struggle anyway but the USA sides will be even harder to place and could scupper the whole thing which would be a massive shame!

The route to SL via on field success would be worthless to unprotected clubs. Accepting that sort of sporting second class citizenship would be an absolute affront to dignity; genuinely shameful. It's a compromise in the same way that the mooted mini-licensing round following Bradford's first demise was a compromise (only more explicit) and it'd be met with similar derision. Clubs won't be complicit in their own shafting - not on that scale.

And that's before the practical implications - can you imagine a final round game between a bottom two who are level on points but one is protected and the other isn't? The latter is doomed to relegation or a play-off irrespective of the result. It'd be farcical.

If the 'integral' teams want another breakaway, inviting others as and when they think they're ready, then that's up to them - as I said SL isn't a prison. But I couldn't follow a puppet club that was only allowed into a league (as opposed to a competition, in this instance) to 'do a job', as they say in professional wrestling I believe.

So, on balance, I'm not quite ready to buy-in

most of what he is saying is right, the Luddite attitude and even worse pre renascence way of thinking is/has held Rl back in this country. we need to take the |NFL approcag if your not getting the fans and not meeting the other criteria, you get help, but if things dont improve we move your team to somewhere who wants it.

Nfl was up until the 60's a college based north and north east seaboard regional sport, they had a plan, to expand nationally, new pro teams in major cities. Dallas Cowboys, expansion team biggest sporting team in the world (arguably, with real Madrid and man U) Miami dolphins, new York jets etr, some of the biggest names in world sport. all expansion teams.
Nrl Melbourne storm expansion team in a hostile aussie rules area 20k average best team in Nrl for over a decade.
rugby league needs a plan, expansion is not the total answer but its part of it, make the game appear bigger and it will get bigger, this will not only help the big clubs it will help all clubs, don't think anyone is saying kick clubs out, but our flagship competition needs the best teams with the better stadiums with the best support and the best geographical spread.

Pretty much along the lines of a conversation I've had this morning.

You just need to look at Union partners/sponsors (NatWest, Land Rover, Guinness, Aviva, Old Mutual Wealth, O2, Samsung, IBM) compared to League's (BetFred, Kingstone Press Cider, Batchelors Mushy Peas). That hasn't happened by accident, it's happened because partners/sponsors know their target market and they want to be associated with a game that speaks volumes about their product, and the social standing of its potential customers.

League is a mostly Northern sport played in predominantly working class towns and former mining communities, flat caps and whippets and all that. In Union, you have clubs in largely wealthy areas, a solid base of aspirational middle Englanders, the old boy network, and if you play your cards right, hell, you might end up rubbing shoulders with the royals! If you were in charge of an investment bank's marketing/sponsorship budget, which sport would you throw the money into for the best return?

Short of a social revolution, there's not a lot that can be done for a quick fix. Calls to just 'market to a wider audience' are simply pie in the sky. This is a deep seated issue with class, political division and the North/South divide at the heart of it.

I've been to a League game in Batley, I've been to a Union game in Bath, they exist in totally different universes.

Bring in teams with largely middle class support bases, like Toronto, New York, Montreal, Boston and Philadelphia, and the sponsorships and advertising revenue will soar to the heavens.

Yep, because those people and those cities are crying out for a minority sport from the north of England that nobody has ever heard of- idiot.

I'd partly agree, but I'm not sure to the extend the political / class division fits in.

There are some affluent parts of the UK right on the doorstep of RL land. I find it hard to believe that we have done all that we can to tap into certain markets of, for example, North Yorkshire and Cheshire.

Thousands of people commute from places like Harrogate to Leeds every day. The train between the two literally passes Headingley Stadium's Western Terrace.

These are people that will at least be familiar with the Leeds Rhinos brand, but how much activity does a club like Leeds actually do in these areas? Have they tried and failed, concluding that the people in that area aren't interested? Is it considered too high-risk, compared to other forms of marketing? Or are they just not interested in that market?

And this applies to all clubs, not just Leeds. We have clubs that are failing to engage markets that are literally across the road.

If carlsberg did posts on this subject on rl fans forums