Toronto were successful in opening the doors to the North American Sports market and were a catalyst for a succesful US / Cananadian competition? [I don’t think this will happen, it’s taken football decades to make headway, the idea of one RL doing it in the face of vested interests in the sports market is in my view fanciful. But let’s say it happened and a 10 team well capitalised competition was up and running within a decade and attracting major sponsorship and TV rights. What effect would it have on the rest of RL? Would it destroy the NRL by attracting all their best players? How long before North America could be producing its own players eg those from college football converted into RL players? If North America was successful then would they effectively control the sport and change the rules, have commercial breaks during games every 10 minutes etc? What would become of the small town game in the UK? Any thoughts on the ramifications if the fantasy came to fruition?

I don’t think it would impact the NRL in anyway

Why not? SBW is purportedly on 4 x what the leading NRL player is on. If that were typical in future, surely the best players would be attracted to North America? Wouldn’t that weaken the NRL?

The American market is potentially massive.
There are individual players in American basketball who earn more than the entire salary cap of the NRL competition.
If league ever got 5% of the American sporting market, America would be the number 1 league nation.
It's a bit of a shame that the smallest and poorest "country" (not an actual country) that plays League, Cook Islands, knocked the largest and richest country that plays league (USA) out of the world cup finals this morning.
I don't mind the cookies, because they love their league and do everything right, but it is basically one group of NZ Maoris calling themselves a country and playing in the WC.

You are correct.

But I think that it is a tragedy that the Cook Islands, which is a joke of a nation, represented only by Australia or New Zealand based heritage players, is playing in the World Cup at the expense of the USA. The USA at least has a significant amateur domestic competition, and will by 2021 likely have a professional team (New York) playing in the RFL structure..

No more than the Chinese football league is damaging the Premier League.

Three of the six highest paid footballers in the world are playing in China.

It’s hardly a tragedy.

You say it has a significant amateur domestic comp but the Wigan schools league is probably a higher standard.

You’d get on the USA team.

What gives you the right(or any of us) to call a proud country a joke? Their only fault is that they are a tiny country but they deserve respect. Oh by the way they qualified on merit!

In reply to the op, you would hope that something close to the blueprint that you mention is similar to the idea sold by, or sold to, Nigel Wood and really, it's depends on if it can be achieved and how it could be achieved.
The infrastructure, in terms of player development would be the key to success and whether this is actually possible and on what sort of timescale is the burning question.

There are certainly people over there with way more money to burn that we currently have in RL but, in theory why not.

Ironic that if the Toronto expansion is successful, in the very long term North America will end up as a rival to the NRL and SL

I bet some posters on here still believe in Father Christmas

It wouldn't be a "rival", it would be a third competition potentially creating two (Canada and USA) competitive international teams. In terms of number of top level athletes produced, the USA is the world leader, and if they knew about the game and understood the rules, tactics, etc then a team of college football players who didn't make it to the NFL or CFL would probably be better than any international RL side other than Australia.

It's all fanciful and pipe dream stuff, but it wouldn't be a bad thing at all if it actually somehow happened.