Quote ="gutterfax"A la Melbourne Storm........they receive additional funding from the NRL because they are classed as expansion and are further bankrolled by the Comps main Broadcast Partner....who 100% owns them.
David Hughes has taken the club as far as he can...he should be applauded and when we eventually do get a permanent home, have a stand named after him, but centrally funding the expansion team in the south is required to protect all the good work done to date.
We have more and more youngsters coming through and it would be criminal if London were to continue to stagnate and die, leaving these kids with no local team to aspire to.'"
London gets a lot of lip service as important to the game, and it gets its share of things like every other club, but I'm struggling to think of one active program or aggressive action London has benefited from since, say, Branson came along (no idea before that personally).
I'm talking from Sky, the RFL, the other clubs.
Junior coaches - all clubs get funding for it; if London got more it was based on Sport England regions.
TV money and other distributions - same. Went into admin in 04 - didn't block us out, but didn't prop it up. Players - we'll loan them to you if we don't need them and they'd benefit from the experience (and you pay them), but then they come back. Salary cap extension for London weighting - nope. When the 10-10-5 rules came in in 2007 when London had nothing near 10 - nope. They're not making it harder on us than any other club, but no easier either - no strong moves.
That's not a criticism necessarily - certainly the RFL & clubs don't have excess resources, and there's no charter that says it should be an uneven playing field I guess.
My point is: there's a fair bit of lip service about it's importance, but no-one does anything proactive or aggressive about it. If it WAS so important, someone would do something about it. The clubs and are RFL aren't complete idiots (possibly) - surely if there was some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they'd be doing something about it right? If it mattered to Sky, they'd do something about it. It's not like we're 5 years into Super League, it's like 18 years.
If it was [iactually [/i worth something
extra to them commercially, in crowds or in TV viewers (actual value), they'd be willing to pay to make it work (money or other resources) - Sky, the clubs or the RFL. It doesn't seem like it's worth particularly more to them than any other club is.
