It's alleged that 40-20 Mag is suggesting a Superleague re-structure.

It has suggested this before that it's coming for the new SKY contract, which many people poo-pooed.

Is Phil Caplan the 40-20 man? Anyway it has to be very likely given there has already been a vote on a new structure that was not kind to the Championships, so it was defeated at the time.

Caplan has now confirmed "A complete overhaul of the game" is coming that includes some "corporate money".........

Hope it’s true we need more money in the game

and no pizza

And ditch the now tainted and massively over-used "Super League" name (Soccer, Athletics, Netball, Basketball, RL, Cricket and others use it!).

Sell the Super League name to the European Super League (the association football one). They don't want to have us linked to them, and they way the RFL and the Super League have protected the game, we are going to have to re-brand at such a low-ebb. We are a -poor sport because of the short sightedness of administrators, poor vision from our leaders and a willingness from fans to accept that our flagship elite competition is so devalued that we can't even get a second party to the table on the TV bidding rights. We wasted £500k on a finders fee for corporate money, but they the board members overvalued the Super League and got a £500k cost for taking a meeting. The Super League is radio-active right now, and the sport is not even a joke, because only a few hundred thousand people would get the joke. We are a niche that will disappear if serious action isn't taken, and by the startling silence from the Super League and the RFL, they seem happy to let everyone all over their good name.

Collective action from Sky customers threatening to walk away from their TV contracts that would conservatively leave a £50m hole in the Sky annual balance sheet. If we protected our own copyright, trademark, image rights, etc we wouldn't have other sports horning in on our 25 years of good work. I do not see how this ends well for us, unless the planned European Super League gives us money to stop calling our league the Super League, European Super League, Super League, Super League Europe, Super League (Europe), Super League (Europe) Ltd, etc and all the names that we have used to describe elite rugby league in Europe over the last quarter of a century.

I think the problem is that looking at the current structure and we just don't have the structure for 1 up 1 down.

Looking at the Championship we seem to have a lack of quality (what the aussies would call park teams) to come up and you would suspect the bottom three would not improve if relegated.

That being said I am not sure a licence or Super 8s league structure would do any better. Changing how teams come in out out of the league just feels like rearranging the deck chairs, we need something more than this to make Superleague and professional RL in general work.

Oh good, another quick fix.
I must check how the last 2 or 3 attempts went

Let's alienate even more fans

They need to do something other than restructure as the game is now boring

I'd guess the words "Super" and "League" are not copyright, even linked as one word.............

Besides the registered name is "Superleague (Europe) Ltd."

Now nobody can pinch that not even the planned Elite Soccer league****

***Which died today anyway....

Oh I think most sensible pundits (who can grasp that Australia take all the best players, and we have the second best players for our superleague) know that Superleague isn't elite and is the second (professional) division competition of the Rugby League world.

The Australian professional league has grown with the growth of money which is a key factor along with adequate talented players.

So as we have [ueven less money[/u from SKY and more regularly lose top English players to Australia, and develop less talent than say 10 years ago then inevitably we have to question 12 clubs being in Superleague. Of course I want 14 clubs and a 26 round season like most but...

10 is the glaring number wether we like it or not and that means clubs playing each other 3 times which us fans on the terraces may hate but I'm 100% sure SKY want to run third fixtures of Saints and Wigan and Hull and Leeds before they ever want bottom club fixtures.

When we were at 14 London collapsed appallingly, Bradford were in freefall and the year after Wakefield decided not to bother playing until the play offs and ended with an appalling minus 534 points difference including an 80-0 defeat at Warrington.

At that time Peacock said it was 10 for a competetive League with good standards top to bottom so the players problem drives this strongly now, even more so the massive cut in SKY money can only be mitigated, and even that only in part, by less clubs sharing the much lower TV deal.

A lack of players and money = 10 clubs...............

Just think,if you had been born a few decades earlier,you could have informed anyone who would listen,how rugby league would never catch on in Australia because it is all rugby union,no player pathway etc just as you have done with French,Canadian,American clubs.

Anyway,having heard a Phil Caplan with podcast with an Australian chap,earlier this year,changing the name of the sport was discussed.
Although folk not greatly interested in sport could identify the difference between netball,basketball,and association football,there are fewer folk who can differentiate between rugby union and rugby league.

The name Leagueball may appeal to a newer,younger audience.
With society currently allowing itself to go back in time to the old slavery,colonisation,statues,et al - How about 1895 Rugby which may inspire those in this country who bang on about history,find museums interesting,the heritage of our sport may garner more interest.

The Problem with the game is that it doesn't know what it wants.

2021: Huddersfield Giants, Salford Red Devils, Wakefield Trinity Wildcats, Hull Kingston Rovers and Leigh Centurions are battling it out to avoid the drop. Whichever one is unfortunate enough to go, will in all likelihood be replaced by Toulouse Olympique or Featherstone Rovers..

Your average British person when asked, wouldn't be able to find Huddersfield, Salford, Wakefield, Featherstone or Leigh on a map, let alone know that Hull has not 1 but 2 Rugby League teams.

That is the problem faced by Super League and the game in general. After a quarter of a Century of chopping and changing, the game doesn't know what it is, where it should be played or what it wants.

If it's happy not to expand, then keep P&R and hope that the monotony of the same teams winning is alleviated by the excitement of relegation, but the reality is that Featherstone replacing Wakefield won't garner the same headlines as Catalans winning the challenge cup.

Choose which way you look at it, there's always going to be a bottom 5, they can't really have a top 4 play off with 12 teams in it, granted the 5 you mention are the main suspects but not always, and as the 2 championship sides mentioned they are really the only 2 worthwhile contenders, so I'm not sure what point your trying to make, apart from stating the obvious.

I'm absolutely certain that your average British person would have even less of a clue as to where to find a lot of football clubs, especially all those in London, and as for rugby union ask your average British person who Wasps and Saracens are for example, and ask them to find them on a map, once again,what's your point?

Not surprising really when the game is run by two different bodies, one being super duper league filled with greedy owners, and the other filled with part time chairman with no crowds very little money who rely on player loans to top up they're squads while at the same time the top clubs take advantage of this by keeping the fringe players fit

I don't think you could argue that the RFL hasn't tried to expand with all the teams that have failed and gone out of business, if you don't know them or can't remember them look them all up there are plenty of them, this particular sport has enjoyed success for well over a 100 years, maybe it's time some folk realised that maybe it's generally a northern game enjoyed by northern people who understand and enjoy the game, and that's all it's ever going to be.

Very good post. I looked all the defunct "expansion" clubs up from the failed South Shields in Victorian times to the mega-failed Toronto Wolfpack in modern times.........

There's about 50..... that's FIVE ZERO Yes attempt after attempt to "expand" all down the years of the games history, but nothing worked.

It's not hard to work out why. It was Northern English people specifically in west and east Yorkshire and south Lancashire who broke from Rugby Union and hoped for the rest of the country and wales to follow them. But they simply didn't. Instead many people turned to soccer that grew and grew or they stayed loyal to Rugby Union.

One of the oldest Expansion clubs is Doncaster. It's a short journey from the RL hotbed of Cas/Ponte/Fev and Wakey yet in nearly 70 years the club hasn't grown anything, just survived on a bit of private money, and a few fans through the turnstyles to buy in players from west Yorkshire. Don't Hull use them as a reserve side? Then there's Sheffield. That's going on 40 years. In these close by places the issue is if people are going to watch Football they watch Soccer, that's the dominant game. If people are going to play Rugby they play Union that's the dominant game.

If anyone wants Rugby League to survive in England you keep the Rugby League tradition alive.

You don't shut it down by blindly giving Superleague places to Toulouse, Ottawa, Toronto, Perpignan and New York thinking that that is actually expansion because these places are a long long way away, then wondering why the clubs you've relegated lose fans by the thousands and less people bother playing the game.

It's about survival and that means the obvious clubs in the obvious places need to make up Superleague and the division below. Outside that nobody is much interested as they have their Soccer and Union.........But hey let's put Valencia in Superleague

So Catalans winning the cup will somehow excite Europe into following Rugby league.

There's far better wind ups on this forum than that





As for monotony Man U, Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea seem monotonous to me with their ultra decade by decade dominance?

Could your "Average British Person" actually find Catalans on a map

No.

The RFL needs a pair of balls and stop being the passive patsy to a handful of clubs. The top flight of any competition is rightly perceived as a very important thing to get right, but in British RL we fixate on the top flight to the detriment of the wider game. We have to have a unified vision for the RL pyramid led not by the owners of the top flight clubs but by the RFL. I suspect that two thirds of clubs in the professional and semi-professional RL will feel shafted by a handful of SL owners. They understandably wish to protect their own clubs, but have demonstrated that this aim is incompatible with setting a strategic direction for the whole game. Some might say say that this is the tail wagging the dog, but the SL dog is withered and has rabies, but it's tail is long, pleasant and wants a stroke.

I also think that shrinking SL due to lack of available players and funding is such a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less clubs you put in your top flight, the less money you'll get to broadcast it and the less reach it has. I don't think dropping to 12 clubs was a cracking idea, and dropping to 10 would just be absurd.

Very well said, sir.

I think we've had this conversation before and its only until you've seen the other side of the coin that it obvious now what you wrote stands true,
it is shameful that clubs like ours don't meet to modern standards and the top clubs seem to want us to stay there at the bottom, could you imagine the tables turning and these rich clubs would fade very quickly, as your club has done.
As fans we can see it but the owners of the top clubs will always want to look after their own interests
like you say the pyramid base is declining and that is where the concentration needs to be put for it to feed upwards

I've always thought Wakey are almost in a no-mans land in terms of who your allies are, and the "Nobody loves us" status often given your fans a sense of mistrust about everyone's intentions toward you. Possibly quite justifiably. As a club you have been nothing short of staggering in retaining your SL status, and remaining solvent thanks to Mr Carter and the other chap who's name I forget. But you know deep down there will be many owners in the elite that don't want you in the top flight and in many respects your natural friends may well be among us down in the Championship. I suspect your owner is having to walk a perpetual tightrope of fighting the clubs corner and justifying it's right to sit at the top table, versus not ruffling the feathers of the sods that might want to invent a restructure that doesn't have you in it. Mr C may well have to vote in favour of things he knows are not game-wide beneficial purely because to not do so would put Wakey materially at risk.

Surely, with a promotion and relegation system, it's more about gaining promotion and not getting relegated.
The clique at the top of the league protect the big 4/5 clubs, with Leeds generally a little on the outside.
McManus and Lenegan seem to have way more influence than Hetherington these days.

RWIW, I think Hetherington is more bothered about the sport of RL than his counterparts at Saints and Wigan, who seem
way more concerned with their own clubs than the sport.

Or game has very little strategy for the medium or long term and without some kind of target to strive for, the sport will
continue to drift.

You ask me " What is your point"?
There were a few.
Relegation is futile in a sport that other than for a handful of clubs can't stand on its own 2 feet. Unlike Soccer, where players wages are insane, a SL club needs maybe £4 million a year in income to survive, but if you cut off the SKY cash now, I reckon 5 might survive. I am not saying Union clubs are any different, just that in terms of 'other forms of income' we do suck!
The location thing? Wasps play in Coventry. I know where that is on a map, but Leigh? Saracens are somewhere in North London, so London would suffice....Wakefield though is a mystery to many? I'm not being a wind-up merchant here, but ask a UK based sports fan with no affiliation to either Union or League about Andy Farrell and you'll get "my point". Again. What do we want and how do we think is the best way to get it?
As for the RFL trying anything? Do not make me laugh. They've thrown money at lost causes like Wales and even London in terms of the barnet sweetener cash, but always too late. They spent more oney on Bradford than they have on any amount of expansion. I am well aware of the number of clubs that have come and gone or are going and not many had any meaningful assistance from the RFL.
Your last point is spot on though. I came to the game late in life and I love it, but I am in a minority. British Sports fans (and probably fans in general) will watch any sport when it's on and RL is a cracking "filler" for SKY, but it'll not be any more than that until either we go all in and spend central cash to expand or we contract and make it a truly SUPER league with 10 viable clubs

[uDrift?[/u what do you mean by that?

I thought it was pretty much agreed that the sport was in [usurvival[/u mode and has been for years. The name of the game is survival unless you or anyone else can point to where "growth" lies and where the game has gone wrong. perhaps someone can tell me what this "some kind of target" is if it's not survival?

As for Leeds "on the outside" what do you mean? They have a very very rich owner who is richer than either Lenegan or McManus don't they? He chooses not to take the reigns of the sport whilst Pearson Lenagan and McManus choose to take a leading role. They aren't dictators though, every club has the same one vote.

It's the same old same old where jealousy appears to lie at the heart of the attack on the prominent rich owners who may lead the sport, but I don't see them dictating anything much?

Remember that this SKY deal has been a long one. It's the last year now, and this is a deal Lenegan, Pearson and McManus did not vote for, they actually lost the vote to people like Michael Carter Gary Hetherington and Ian Fulton. If there's no strategy then go see them and ask them about it??

They can tell you all about their "£Million Pound Game" "strategy, how did that go then??

Hull Daily Mail seems to be lifting the lid on the restructure talks.

As it stands the favourite is the two leagues of ten clubs creating an SL1 and SL2, the other option not as well supported is the idea of a 14 club Superleague.

There's also consideration on the money split, if it went to 10 then the big powerful clubs might just share the lot.....But anyway talks are well underway.

Who knows how they would sort it, would league positions matter come the end of the year? If SL drops to 10 would they hand pick the 10 clubs from applications, or would they just relegate the bottom two, or even relegate the bottom three, so the top club in the Championship goes up??

14 clubs gives a Home and Away format but the third fixtures the top clubs get like Hull.v Leeds, Saints.v. Wigan. Wire.v. either of the latter would have to be dumped - so 14 clubs means the lower TV money is split 14 ways and some big third fixture crowds are lost to the big clubs.

My view is this will be all about the big clubs getting as much money as possible, and SKY may be happy with teams playing each other 3 times so it's looking like 2 x 10

Last time this came up ALL the clubs voted and the tail wagged the dog and 2x10 was thrown out on the votes of league one clubs and the smaller championship clubs like Batley and Dewsbury. I cannot for the life of me think the tail will be in any way allowed to wag the dog again.........

There are 36 clubs, but I don't think the French clubs vote so I can't see how this time if 20 clubs are going under the Superleagues wing, that the 14 clubs likely to be left out could do anything about it. If Batley and Dewsbury again took a stand they would risk being ones left out........