[urlhttp://www1.skysports.com/rugby-league/news/12196/7926277/[/url

About bloody time.

12 team league with relegation and promotion it's the future (as well as the past).

12 or 10 team league is badly needed the quality of games has slipped since the introduction of 14 teams. The transition between the semi pro championship and full time professional super league need's to be addressed with financial safe guards for promoted/relegated teams.

I heard Maurice Lindsay is behind it.

Nigel Wood is in charge of the review so that tells you it is doomed to failure before it starts. What is needed is a review of those running the RFL!

As to P&R its about time people realised that the sport going full time means it is unworkable - full stop.

I don't understand your comment - what do you mean?

That was strongly noted in the Watkins report:



Here's the original report: [urlhttp://www.therfl.co.uk/~rflmedia/docs/RFL_TheWatkinsReview.pdf[/url

It is unworkable because when a team is relegated they have to effectively cease being a professional team. All playing contracts are ripped up and the players become free agents. The team is effectively destroyed.

It isn't just about sporting success and failure it is about money and finance. When the sport was semi-pro relegation was just a sporting failure and the financial aspect wasn't a big factor. Players who worked down the pit carried on working down the pit. They may have earned a bit less in win bonuses in a lower division but then they were not full time professionals whose sole income was from sport.

I forget what the salary cap is in NL1 but I think it is £400K. The SL salary cap which is split between your top 25 players gives an average wage of £64K per player. In NL1 it is £16K.

Now the RFL could say you can carry on with your £1.6m salary cap if you get relegated but what is the point of that? All that would mean is you would win every game the season after and get promoted straight back into SL. More than likely swapping places with the the team who took your place. A complete pointless exercise.

Chairman are saying there is not enough money for a 14 team super league. To make P&R work the gap between the standards in the divisions needs to be much smaller than it is which implies spreading the cash even further.

You want P&R - then start a campaign for a return to semi-professional status for al clubs.

You want P&R - then start a campaign for a return to semi-professional status for al clubs.

What a stupid comment. RL managed for about 100 years with P & R, Its only the last few years it has gone tits up with the licensing crap. You want to send our game back to the dark ages with semi pro's then i am afraid you are in a minority. I was interested in that post until you started talking rubbish.

Every side had the chance to be good when we were all semi-pro. Not our fault that we were streets ahead of everyone else. Are you old Maurice, He got bored of us being too good too.

Fair point but why not introduce parachute payments like in football?

Rubbish. P+R would make Rugby League go backwards. RL stood still as a sport for years whilst watching Union soar past in terms of finances and exposure. The financial gap between the championship and super league is too vast for a team to be ripped apart and rebuilt everytime they go up or down, just doesn't work.

You can't reduce the salary cap in super league as that will dilute the sport even further, so where do you get the extra money from to bump up the championship SC?

For once I agree with Dave O to an extent. The gap between SL and NL1 is too great and the main problem is the finances between the two. Unless the salary caps are similar then it is a pointless exercise for P&R, as Dave said the relegated team has all it's playing contracts ripped up and the promoted team normally picks up the players that are left.

I've always thought that the licensing model should have 3 full cycles to prove itself or not. This review smacks of panic after the Crusaders fiasco (which was mainly the RFL's own making ) & the current Bradford mess.

If the current model is simply reversed back to the old P&R model even with tweaks, we'll go back to teams parachuting NRL players in to ensure SL places & there'll be little incentive to push as much money into the juniors (and their noses might be out of joint when they see their places taken away by panic buying too).

I'm worried that bad decisions are about to be made in haste that will set the game back irrevocably or at least for some long time.

RL has no spare resource to waste, so why bring back relegation where clubs waste time and money on aussies rather than breeding young players as they do in any salary cap sports.

Where is the money going to come from for that and how does that stop the relegated team from being virtually guaranteed promotion again the year after as they will have a much better squad than their NL1 counterparts?

The problem is lack of money in NL1. If they could all afford a £1.6m cap or even say £1m then P&R would be viable.

I think the bottom line is we can only afford one division that is a full time pro division and because that is the case the idea we can have P&R between that and a semi-pro almost amateur league is just unworkable.

We have adopted the Aussie play-offs to decide the champions but still want to cling to P&R at the bottom. The Aussies don't have P&R and it doesn't seem to bother them. They have the professional and full time NRL and then they have the country sides and they would laugh at anyone who suggested there should be P&R between the two.

Oh dear. I agree with DaveO



There isn't enough money in RL to run two professional divisions so the only way that P&R will work correctly is if we go semi-pro (wouldn't RU love that). Team A gets relegated and either folds or walks the NL the following season. Team B gets promoted and flops like a fish out of water as they haven't the funds to compete.

Widnes have known since this time last year that they would be in SL and it isn't until recently that they've started to play well after a few loan signings improved their squad. They've also made a couple of big name signings for next season which they wouldn't be able to do if they were unsure of their future. (Widnes have a fair bit of cash behind them as well don't forget, imagine if they were broke)

When the seasons ran paralel and P&R was alive, the team that came up went straight back down and then came up again.

Since 1998:

98 - Huddersfield came bottom with just 4 points but stayed up on technicality
99 - Huddersfield came bottom but stayed up on technicality
00 - See above
01 - Huddersfield finally went down and were replaced by Widnes
02 - Salford went down and Huddersfield walked the NL by 10 points and 16 in the final
03 - Halifax went bust and went down, Salford came straight back up
04 - Cas went down, Leigh came up
05 - Leigh went down, Cas came up
06 - Cas went down, HKR came up
07 - Cas came up - Salford went down
08 - Salford finished top - Cas came bottom - no relegation

Six times out of the 11 listed there the team that went down came back up. On 3 occasions there was no relegation as the winners of the NL didn't match the criteria to come up. On 1 occasion, a team went bust and failed to come back.

The sport isn't big enough for it to work succesfully imho. You'll end up crippling clubs.

It's simple. P & R is never going to work while we have a fully pro league with lots of cash, and a semi-pro, almost amateur, league immediately below it with very little cash. To change this, you either need lots of cash at the 2nd level, or you massively dilute the quality at the top level. Both of these narrow the gap, but one reduces the quality of the game overall, and the other is never going to happen as the money simply isn't there.

Remember that soccer in the UK has 4 leagues where the level at the bottom of one division is much the same as the top of the league below it. How often can you say the same in RL? Ok so Fev beat Cas this year, but that's a one-off that you maybe see in the CC one year in 3 or 4 rather than the norm. When was the last CC upset? 2 or 3 years ago? Didn't HKR lose a few years ago? Warrington?

With the system we have, the bottom club gets a few years to try to gain some consistency. Can you imagine Widnes this year in a P & R league? They would panic-buy a couple of mid-grade aussies and hope for the best. As it is, they've planned for the future with a few decent brit loans, and signed a couple of brit players for next year. Give them the full 3 years and they might be competitive. We also improve the quality and experience of brit players, thus improving the chances of beating the aussies.

In the past under P & R, most of the time, the team going down offloads their players, and the team coming up picks up most of them. The handful of players left either stick with the team going down (because they aren't good enough for any of the better teams), or they get picked up by one of the other low teams, again because they aren't good enough.

Until the top of the championship is as good as the bottom of the SL, then P & R simply will not work - the gulf is too great.

If you think we have financial issues ATM, I'd hate to think how much worse they'd be for some clubs if they had the choice of overspending in an attempt to avoid relegation. The GFC has hit RL very very hard - we're a minority sport and it should be entirely expected that minority sports get hit harder than football. Wakefield are a good - and ignored - example of how franchising helps, because they have been able to stabilise themseleves without being relegated, which is exactly what would have happened had we had P+R. Under P+R Wakey would most likely be a permanent Championship team if they survived at all.

My view is that 14 teams is CURRENTLY too many, based on availability of decent players, which has been reduced by the reduction in imports available (plus lets not forget some genuine quality players going the other way). But the real question is, how many clubs would be sustainable once we've had a better-functioning junior setup across SL for a number of years, and clubs use overseas players for what they should be - the odd star signing, not the backbone of the side?

The evidence I've seen in terms of young players coming through is that once clubs really focus on it, and don't just pay lip-service, SL can develop a lot more good British players than it has in the past, right across the board. The trouble is it takes years to get there - what worries me is some short-term 'fix' being made that in fact ruins any chance of long-term improvement to the game.

The league needs to go back to 12 or even 10 teams, but keep the franchise system.

Agreed. I'd go for 10 teams, if it was 12 I think you'd have to look at the inclusion of another French side (which I'd argue it might be time for anyway).

I think ideally it would be 10, with the current level of competitiveness in the league. But I can't see 4 teams being relegated, particularly as they have already said 4 teams are going to promoted from Champs 1 to the Champs. The whole league needs revamping, I don't think we'll see anything happen until this current licensing period ends though.

I still think a two-tiered SL would probably work, though all of the TV deals would have to set up sensibly so there was enough money to go round. Football league style promotion and relegation won't work between a full time professional elite division and a part time semi pro 2nd tier.

Less matches for the same money? The close season seems endless as it is. The clubs would not want less cash coming in, and a lot of fans would feel a bit short-changed if ticket prices stayed the same, but for me it would be the loss of matches that disappoints. On relegation and promotion, yes I’m in favour. Maybe the club gaining promotion should have a season free from relegation fears giving them time to get a foot-hold in the SL. If they ended up bottom in their first season the side next to bottom would suffer the ignominy.

I find it all infuriating because there are arguments for both sides. A freeze on P&R was brought in to stabilise the league, which in some ways it did (Bradford/Crusaders aside)... but.. NL/Championship/Conference clubs will always struggle to build to a level to move up because you hit a ceiling.

Ambition is stifled, clubs work within the means of their league (there's the stability thing) so even when they do meet the 'criteria' they'll struggle when they move up a grade.

The only thing the RFL could do a few years prior to reintroducing P&R is ensuring lower league clubs have an upper league partner so that playing resources can be shared through dual registration. It's not guaranteed to make newly promoted teams an instant success but it would create less of a gap between leagues. A few lower league clubs use a feeder approach and it does have an impact.

I'd ruddy love relegation and promotion, but it wouldn't be feasible for years.

I see your point.

What budget do the NL1 clubs work off?