Have Bradford suffered the consequences of Sky tv's need to have a Bradford team involved in SL in the first place in order to provide a spicy derby with Leeds ? For many years before Superleague Bradford were the main contenders for the wooden spoon among all 30 odd clubs & were artificially elevated to a great club to satisfy the needs of sky & its viewing figures.
Is it a lack of spectators or poor management behind the scenes that have brought Bradford back to the edge which is a pity ,considering their great success in the early years of SL The story of Bradford though should be a warning to us all how fragile a once great club can be.

In football there are always doomsday predictions when a club gets in financial trouble, Leeds, Southampton, Portsmouth etc, we hear that "this is the tip of the iceberg" and the game is on the brink.....I'm still waiting for this global collapse of football. There are a lot of clubs in football and a lot of people that want to invest and have a go at it, some do it well some do it badly but those that do it badly drop down the divisions and there is always another club ready to take their place.

My take on this (which applies to any sport) is that you should focus on making the market work better:

1. There should be clear routes of entry and exit, whether that be promotion/relegation or franchising. Not a situation where there is a chosen elite that have an inherent right to be in SL, because then the game gets dependent on them and if one gets in trouble people say it threatens the game. This is exactly the problem you have in the banking sector where its difficult to enter the market: banks can get in to trouble and say "think of the risk to the economy if we went bust, bail us out please!"

2. If the issue is that there aren't enough viable clubs to compete in the top division, reduce the size of the top division. Over time if you then get a situation where it looks like the top division could support more teams, expand it. But from a given size there should always be movement in and out. If a club chases gold and lives beyond its means and goes bust then it needs to drop out and be replaced by another club that can have a go.

3. No bail outs, no intervention from the governing body to save clubs that have made a mess of things. When the precedent is set that that will happen you have a moral hazard problem. Clubs can take excessive risks to try and win trophies and if it comes off they enjoy the benefits. If it doesn't then they can appeal to everyone else about how sad their situation is and how it would damage the game if they were allowed to go bust so its someone else's responsibility to bail them out. That just encourages excessive risk taking.

The game would live on without Bradford in the top division just like it lived on without Swinton (another once great club) and for many years Widnes were outside the top division too.

If there is genuinely a market for top division rugby league in the Bradford area then at some point the club will come back.

If something good has come out of this, it's the emergence of Francis Cummings.
Patience and nobility.
Get him on board as Smith's successor.

^drugs, definitely drugs.

....when Smith calls it a day.
I would have thought that was obvious.

While this probably happens at all clubs, and it just so happened I used to sit at Odsal with Bateman's grandad, but he said a fair few of the players who've gone on to leave Bradford didn't get on with Cummins a lot of the time.

That's the thing, it's okay sounding all nice in an interview, people are very different away from the cameras.

Scruton signs for Wakefield www.sportinglife.com/rugby-leagu ... -wakefield

Scruton signs for Wakefield www.sportinglife.com/rugby-leagu ... -wakefield