Sadly the game does not have enough money in it for two ten team full time competitions so we can not have P&R as teams coming up will be too weak and teams going down will be combated on and off the field.

Finding a way to fund 14 ft clubs in SL and enough money in lower divisions to be sustainable as part time development clubs is the priority for the RFL.

I think its more fundamental than this.
Step 1, is for the game to decide where it wants to be in 5 years time and then 10 years time and then set about achieving its aims.

At the moment everyone wants a miracle cure that will give us 10 or 12 equally competitive teams in the top flight, plus a second tier capable of producing teams that can advance to the top flight.
For this to happen, the game has to fund the second tier at a similar level to the top flight.

The stumbling block is our inability as a sport to be able to attract funding/ sponsorship at a sufficient level.

Is it time to bite the bullet and move to a full on franchise system and take away the prospect of promotion (and relegation) altogether and it would allow the future addition of any club, that could prove itself worthy of a franchise.

The starting point could be either the current 14 SL clubs, or reset the benchmark of exactly what a SL club should be.

So why is it being presented now then? Surely we should be focusing our priorities on doing the things which will actually address the problems we have rather than spending time and effort of undertaking a major structural change which wouldnt address our problems.

That is true. But I didnt say that the problems were invented because this isnt a solution for them. I said they were invented because they are.
That isnt an alternative solution. Keeping this as they are isnt an alternative solution to this proposal because this proposal isnt a solution to the problems caused by the status quo.

Because the big clubs will play each other more, getting higher attendances, higher visibility, more corporates, better sponsorship etc etc etc. They will also play the other teams less, giving them lower attedances, lower visibility, etc etc etc, that evens itself with the clubs who are relegated getting less doesnt it. It will bring down a few teams and up few teams to some mid-point between the championship and SL. The big clubs will continue to grow. The small clubs will shrink.

Because it wont. Because it doesnt address them. Because as I explained before (and you were arguing nobody had suggested it would address these problems). It isnt a solution to these problems. Each of these problems has their own individual solution.
they would as we have seen, they didnt. Every team which was promoted got better attendances in SL than in their promotion season. No, as we have seen, they didnt.


There is 20 teams in that league.

Agreed. It's mental. I mean, utterly mental. We can't even get Widnes, Castleford, Salford and London to be competitive in the top 14 on any consistent basis, and even a team like Saints, missing just a few players, can find itself uncompetitive. Yet some idiot has proposed a system in which the 10 nearest semi-pro clubs should play the likes of Wigan, Leeds, Wire ?

Nuts. Completely nuts. I can't even begin to imagine what the person who proposed this was smoking, but it should be illegal.

I think you're very naughty, and are trying to wind up championship clubs' fans. But I did enjoy reading that.

Exactly. The problem we have is money. We have enough to sustain a professional competition for 14 clubs, but only if they're supplemented by cash from sugar daddies. No drama there - that's the position of nearly every pro sports club. But we don't have enough cash to either (a) give money to the less well-supported clubs of the championship to go professional, (b) raise the salary cap for those clubs with cash, because to do so would make the current league-within-a-league divisions even more entrenched, or (c) to compete with the NRL or RU for top players.

There are two answers to this. The first is to focus hard on youth development systems so that we produce enough decent talent to replace the ones who get poached by richer competitions. To be fair to the cliubs and the RFL, that is certainly in a lot better state than it was. The second is to get more cash from TV, more cash from sponsorship and more cash from international tournaments.

The problem is that the RFL have, in the last decade, proved themselves to be utterly useless at raising cash. The Stobart free gift of the whole competition for 12 lorries was an utterly insane decision which has come back to bite us this year, because no sponsor is going to pay large bucks for something which the owners value so little that they gave it away. In addition, the negotiations with SKY over TV deals have been so poor by comparison to other sports commanding a similar audience. The canny international execs at SKY must watch Nigel wandering through their door with his begging bowl, and start laughing behind their hands.

As others have said, this is an attempt to address a problem we don't have. Our problem is not a lack of games between the top 12 clubs and the next 12, or a lack of fixtures. Our problem is a lack of money, and I'd rather the RFL actually used their time and energy employing someone who might actually be able to get some companies to part with some cash, and deliver a decent TV deal, than waste it on this nonsense.

www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyl ... eason.html "That plan would see 11 rounds of the 12-team format, allowing every club to play each other, before the top eight from the top division would splinter away into their own competition. The bottom four teams in the revamped Super League would finish the season playing in an eight-team competition involving the top four teams in the Championship. The bottom eight teams of the Championship would contest the third tier."

www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyl ... eason.html "That plan would see 11 rounds of the 12-team format, allowing every club to play each other, before the top eight from the top division would splinter away into their own competition. The bottom four teams in the revamped Super League would finish the season playing in an eight-team competition involving the top four teams in the Championship. The bottom eight teams of the Championship would contest the third tier."

How does this help anything?

Minor details like...what will be the salary cap(s?) during this fiasco? come to mind. How will clubs possibly plan revenue/expenditure against this uncertainty? Will the lower SL and higher championship teams go on a spending spree to try and ensure they get SL places (with resulting administration later for those that fail and maybe even some that succeed)? And what about the lottery that is the fixture list - imagine getting your away games in the first 11 games against top teams! Which teams will be landed with 6 away games?

So here is how it could look in 2015:

[uSuper League 1[/u:

Leeds
Huddersfield
Wigan
Warrington
St. Helens
Catalans
Hull FC
Bradford
=#0000FFWakefield
Toulouse
London
Salford

[uSuper League 2[/u:

=#0000FFHull KR
Widnes
Castleford
Halifax
Sheffield
Featherstone
Leigh
Batley
Whitehaven
Workington
Swinton
North Wales


So halfway through the season perhaps Salford, London, Wakefield and Toulouse split off and play Hull KR, Widnes, Castleford, and either Halifax or Sheffield or Featherstone for the right to be in the top four promoted back up to Super League 1 the following year.

Isn't it likely that the bottom four SL 1 clubs, with their superior funding, will be too strong for the top 4 SL 2 clubs, and nothing will be achieved?

I used to be for franchising, I used to be for locked Super League, I used to be pro salary cap, but it has been poorly managed, the fans are getting totally ignored and shat on, from the introduction of the Bonus Point to this ridiculous idea of split divisions, in my opinion Nigel Wood & the RFL are slowly but surely bringing the game to it's knees.

Instead of building on a straight easy system that works, top 5 play offs and regular up and down in a 12 team division for the top flight and throughout the divisions keeping a small but important amount of imports we have a division being split into more playoffs and more and more sub divisions.

Hard enough for the most ardent supporters to follow.

It's time for the people at the top of the think about reverting to regular league systems that are easy to follow, sometimes simple is the best policy.

2015, two tens, bottom 4in SL 2014 plus Toulouse fax Fev sheff Leigh and 1 other
SL 1 gets as now, SL 2 gets about £650k more if extra funding is found. Cap in 1 - £2.2m with £1.8m min, £1.2 m in 2
27 games, 5 team play off, 1up 1 down
Not an extra penny needed to fund that

So they've finally come across the proposal. Fair enough.

A few points - do people actually find this structure complicated? Seriously? Do people also find...say 32 team world cup formats difficult? And the playoff systems difficult? Let alone McIntyre type playoff systems.

If so I'm just surprised...it just struck me as a simple way to keep competitive games. A compromise between Challenge-Ladder type systems, and pure league systems.

As for



I've already expressed my distaste for one up one down P&R. Sure it's simple, but it's damn stupid. Like FPTP elections are painfully stupid, but I guess people have shown they prefer things that they understand how they work and don't understand how crap they are; to things that maybe require 30s of effort to understand and don't suffer the same problems...

I read it - I thought crazy.

But it does give you potentially a lot more competitive games.

You would have to sort salary cap and monies would have to be allocated as to which division you played in.

Magic weekend as the last game before the split could be awesome - 3 points for a win because you would need a neutral fixture for an 11 game to work.

Then start the challenge cup or have an international as breather week.

Grand finals top 4 each division 1 play 2 winner to final 3 plays 4 winner players loser of 1 v 2

All grand finals at Old trafford.

Its probably the best way of reitroducing p and r without killing clubs.

How player contracts would work would be difficult and also the dual contracts.

I'm not a line-by-line defender of this over-complex proposal, but neither do I think looking at structure versus 'finding cash' is an either/or thing. All of this, is always, and always has been, a constant chicken-and-egg situation - we'll never get away from that. What's very challenging in RL, is the high disparity in earning power, and the fact that the sport itself is fairly brutal at exposing differences in strength, more so than any major UK sport - you can't 'park the bus', or kick for touch and collapse scrums all day, etc. if you're a weaker side.

The 'fix' ( salary cap ) causes at least as many problems as it solves, namely, the few clubs that could occasionally afford to pay stars are unable to do so. We can go on and on about 'improving marketing' and no doubt we could do dramatically better - I think the RFL and in particular are p*ss**r marketeers - BUT, nothing is better for marketing than big name, box office players. Like it or not, its also helpful if they're box-office off the field too, whether that's your housewives' favourite like a Johnny Wilkinson or someone naughty like Alex Higgins. Look how snooker suffered since it lost most of its 'characters'.

This is a much more insidious problem than people realize. We talk about 'improving youth development' but a lot of that depends on the amount of interest youth have in the game. If the sport doesn't look like a place that - should you turn out to be a world-beater - you can make a spectacular living, it is less attractive to a talented young athlete. Sure you could do well in the UK and move to the NRL or RU, but is that really the story we want to our kids to dream about? Now, if you're an Olympian purist, maybe you don't want people who think about fame and fortune, that's fine.

I'll drone on endlessly about how I think the cap tries to fix the wrong problem...it doesn't really matter if clubs spend silly money on a limited number of stars (provided they can afford it - though even then its a matter of debate as to whether a governing body should interfere in how a club runs its own finances)...the real problem with the kind of thing we saw in the past, with Wigan especially, is clubs with lots more (relatively) money, buying up talent *which mostly sits on the bench* that ought to be playing first team at other clubs. If we placed very tight limits on the number of players on big money (but that money can be as big as you can afford) then some clubs would be able to retain world-class talent, whilst also being *forced* to have a great youth structure (your squad limit is so small, you need excellent development players).

On the basis of the figures given it seems like a potential goldmine for unambitious clubs

Clubs in the lower leagues get £180k, clubs in the upper league get £1.2m. SC of lower league is apparently £600k and upper league £1.65m.

You could, if you were smart, spend say £900k on wages so you could comfortably beat the lower league teams spending 2/3rds of that, and then get beaten comfortably by the upper league teams spending nigh on double but stay in the upper division and pocket £300k a season for getting smashed for 8 games a year and winning an essentially semi-pro league.

You never have to bother challenging for the play-offs, you don’t even need to bother trying to stay in the ‘top 8’ All you need to do is be the 9th-13th best team in the country and you can run a championship level squad on an SL level grant, and have a pro-team which would only need to finish 4th in an 8 team league where 4 of them are semi-pro. Easy money. Doesn’t help the game in any way but it is easy money someone.

So the upper league cap will be £1.65M? Dear oh dear. Whilst I don't think you have much clue about what the problem is, if what you say is correct, the RFL have less of one.

That doesn’t even make sense as a statement.

Must try harder.

Do you have a link for that information? Haven't seen S/C mentioned anywhere?

So you don't like 1 up 1 down, but you like the idea of 4 down half way through the season.

This will be a disaster for the sport. Yes the games will be more competitive for the top 8'teams. The championship will be a joke. 4 teams on a cap of 180k and 4 teams on a cap of 1.6 mil. That's going to be competitive!!!!!

Also when one if the biggest problems facing SL is a talent drain to union and the NRL, the RFL think it's a good idea to reduce the cap!

Madness and this will take the sport back even more than licensing.

Are you new to the game of RL?

You have to be pretty bad to be able to spend nearly half as much again on wages, and still not be able to finish in the top 4 of an 8 team league where half of them are semi-pro.

Im not saying its beyond our chairmen to f@ck it up, but still………

They can mess around with the League structure all they want...as previous posters have stated its down to lack of money in our sport.

The people at Red Hall can't find or generate enough (down partly to the Stobart disaster). Until the ones at the top are replaced by people who are better the sport won't go forward.

Money aside, as this is obviously the main stumbling block, I think it could work.

11 games played before the split (5 at home, 5 away and one at magic weekend). The challenge cup could be started earlier so that more rounds are played earlier in the year. The final round of games before the split are played at the Magic Weekend on the bank holiday at the beginning of May, with the challenge cup final on the bank holiday at the end of May.

Then the split occurs, giving three leagues of 8 with everyone playing each other home and away, giving every team 25 league games in total.

Not read all the thread but have the other 3 options been posted ?

As I understand it there are 4 proposals which will be voted on at the end of the season. These are....

1. The split league structure as per this thread

2. Retain the current league structure with 1 up / 1 down P&R between SL and Championship

3. SL1 of 12 clubs, SL2 of 10 clubs with automatic P&R between them

4. 4 leagues of 10 with automatic P&R between all leagues

Correct. We've got very poor leadership. Thus a lot of what they propose is daft, and when they do propose something sensible, they're not competent to implement it.

Your point is depressingly true - it's all effectively hot air anyway, because self-justifying clowns remain in charge whatever we do.

It's a total mystery to me why the sport tolerates it. I'm amazed we haven't had breakaway threats from various groups, whether the top 8, or the championship, or both.