tbh thats exactly how i feel at the moment.....the only thing keeping me going is the afternoon / night out and a few beers with mates! At the minute I don't generally enjoy watching most games of SL as the game is dull and generally boring compared to a few years ago and the majority of tries are scored, and games are won off the back of stupid errors.

In terms of wigan i dont really look forward to the game any more, and just look forward to the crack, meetin up with mates and havin a few jars - The worst bit of the day for me now are the matches!!

Are you mad, if we had the success that Leeds and saints have had over the past few years then we would get crowds over 20,000 easy. We got an average of 16,000 when we were bottom of the league and crowds went up. We have 30,000 fans willing to go to finals and stuff when we get there, which I admit has not been too often recently but surely we have potential to grow if not all the Wigan fans are coming to the games. Wigan is the biggest name in rugby, no one else can have this marketing slogan.

Spending half your turnover is still a salary cap, as it was set at 50%.
There are all sorts of remedies for improving British Rugby League and most are around improving the cap.
Some want it at 50%
Others believe that an inflation figure put in each year would keep the purchasing power the same where without it there is a decrease in the real money you can spend.
Quite a few people think that any player under 21 should be excluded from the salary cap. This is done in the Championship.
Then there are those who are like me and think it is a complete waste of time always has been and always will be.
It was set up in 1996 to stop clubs going broke, failed in 1997 and every year since when clubs have got into financial difficulties.
Then we were told it was to create a level playing field. That's absolute rubbish, five teams don't even spend £1.6m so how can it be a level playing field?
Since SL started the standard has dropped dramatically.
Someone mentioned the World Cup.
We got smashed by Australia in Melbourne.
We played there 1992 when our best wingman was Martin Offiah.
Our best wingman last year was Ade Gardner. What a drop that is"!
1992 our loose forwards were Ellery Hanley & Phil Clarke.
2008 the 13s were Sinfield and Purdham, Hanley to Purham isn't a drop in standards, its falling off a cliff.
1992 the halves were Edwards, Gregory & Schofield. Last year Pryce, McGuire and Burrow. Another massive fall in player quality.
We all know this but its the Super League Club Chairmen who makes the rules and Ian Lenagan like the rest think the salary cap is truly wonderful.
None of them ever talk about the drop in quality just rubbish about an even competition and level playing fields. Whatever those two things are!
The need to improve the quality of the players, quality of Rugby, improve the competitions and improve our International Squad.
Since Super League started and the salary cap imposed standards have dropped.
The decline needs reversing but we don't have people making the rules who even begin to think that we are in decline.
Unless the SLCC reverse their policy of decline then we are in real trouble.

Well of course they do.


It means they can run a SL club without having to dig too deeply into their pockets!

No I think you have easily proven that you are mad. You are talking as if it is easy when no team has ever done it



If you are almost at saturation point with your audience, which Wigan is, success will not make that much difference and certainly not an extra 25% difference. Wigan isnt even that big to get all these extra fans.

On the head mate! Not just the SC but the way the game is played means that real talented players do not get enough time to play and develop their creative skills. The games just become an impact game based on hard running and collision. Therefore we have just a massive amount of players who can run hard and have little skill. Even someone like Pryce who everybody raves about is a one trick pony IMO with his show and go move which surprisingly only works in the talentless SL....as soon as he goes to the WC hes shown up as an average player with no real talent. Look at someone like barrett last year and the year before.....there's 100s of barrets playin in the NRL comp, yet he was SL best player by some distance, and even during his time didnt impact as well as he should because of the talent around him wasnt good enough.

We need to look at the way the game is played and change the rules if necessary to ensure fast flowing passing rugby is not lost due to the impact tactics of the game, going back to 5 metres if necessary!

The problem as I see it in the next few years is that it will only get worse as well. Young lads even in the north now see union as the only viable way to play rugby and get paid a decent wage for it. We're holding ourself back with the SC to wakefield/ london /Salford and cetlics level.....to make the whole sport a bunch of paupors who cant spend any significant amount of money. That will mean that even if we can unearth any real talent they will go to union. If players of hanley, edwards, gregorys calibre were playing now theyd all be in union.

What will happen to us in the next 10 years if we persist with the stupid SC will be a general decline in RL.....we are slowly shooting ourselves in the foot and killing the sport from within. Diluting the sport at the top level means that everyone will only have the spending power of salford/ london etc. and will mean that we fall further behind union, better players will go away from the sport, and crowds at even top teams like wigan/ leeds etc. will start to fall as the product worsens and the league becomes a second rate league...after all wheres the incentive for the clubs to spend?
IMO we'll end up where we were in the 70s playing in tired grounds in front of average crowds of 4-5k while union will go up.

Wat we need to be doing is encouraging wigan and leeds to spend what they can. Then teams like salford, quins, celtic, will HAVE to increase crowds and revenue or otherwise will find their natural level in the sport in NL1 or NL2, and be replaced by stonger clubs who should be in and have potential to grow the sport. Salford quins wakey etc will never get crowds of more than 5k.....they need to realise if they arent having crowds of 10 k they shouldnt be in SL in the first place.

What we are doing with the salary cap would be akin to throwing Macclesfield, Chester, Darlington etc. in the premier league and then saying to all the top teams like united and chelsea that you can only spend £1 million on players a year to make it fair and competive with what chester and darlington can spend. What would happen? The Premier league would go from being the top soccer league in the world to a back water poor league because it was being held back....all the best players would leave for other leagues where they could get their market value, and the league would disintegrate though it would [i'be competative and how good would it be to see darlington beat man u at old trafford'[/i where have we heard that before?!?! hmmmm. 10 years down the line old trafford would have 10k turning up to watch a poor standard of soccer.

lets be honest teams like Salford, Quins, Celtic, Wakefield should not be in the super league in the first place....IMO we should revert to the original position....Start with Wigan, Saints, Leeds, Hull, Hull KR, Dire, Catalan and Possibly Bradford, go back to 12 teams (there is not enough serious talent playing RL at the min to justify 14 teams) and then have 5 franchise spots for teams who can guarentee the original criteria and are big enough to be in the league.

Im all for a competative league, but I want all teams to be NRL level or to the level that saints and bradford were 5 years ago, not competative but not much above national league level which is where we are slowly heading!

Huddersfield would still need to improve and would need to guarentee 10k crowds within 2 years to get in, and the rest would be out for me. Saints, Bradford, Wire and Catalans, KR would all be told they were on threshold level and needed to have 10k crowds as a bare minumum and super league standard stadia to continue in the league.

Thats a pretty broadbrush statement you've just made there.
Now, if you want to keep any credibility at --- Justify it.
From where do you draw that conclusion? What research have you done?
As a percentage of Wigans population, what figure would consitute the club reaching 'saturation' point?
Show me your stats, then i [imight[/i just take you seriously.

If Wigan signed the likes of Lockyer, Mason, Sonny Bill Williams or someone similar in reputation and we were challenging for honours we could quite easily average 20,000 or thereabouts.

Same goes for Leeds and maybe Hull FC or Hull KR.

Saints could average 16,000 same with Warrington, Catalans and Bradford.

Celtic should not be in superleague, they could be in time but they need more time to establish roots.

Halifax or Widnes should be in instead.

Again if it is so easy then why has no club ever done it before. You are living in cloud cuckoo land.

fetch my whippet and flat cap and im going blackpool on holiday.

Have some ambition and see the long term. If league doesn't expand it will be dead on its arris in 20 years.

Anything has long as Wigan are leading the way is all im hearing through all self pitying nonsense.

The only thing wrong with the game is the way it's marketed. Top product that people don't know enough about

It has never been done because we are artificially held back by the salary cap. With relegation being scrapped we will see more youngsters being blooded which is good because there seems to be a lot of good players with lots of potential, when they progress and get older and better a time will come when they move on to another club or another good player moves on due to salary cap or a better offer at another club, sharing the talent will only dillute the comp.

If you let the teams spend what they earn you will get the hardworking clubs being rewarded because at the minute what is the point of any club making more than 4 million? There is none because they can't do anything with it! If you take away that restraint and say you can spend half of what you earn clubs will make more of an effort to get the fans in for games and fans will buy more merchandise and go to more games because it is funding the wages for a potential new star player therefore their team gets better due to them spending the cash on the club.

Reward the hard working clubs on and off the field, let us spend what we earn!

not really. if wigan can average 14k now then put a few star players out and start getting to finals and the crowds would shoot up. 18k would be easily achievable within the next 2 years IMO and then 20k 2 or so years further on in the future….problem is can we get success and star players under the current CC restrictions and thus up our crowds?. How you can say that is cloud cuckoo land tho is ridiculous.

Wigan RL are actually marketed now, where we weren’t previously, and a lot of our new fans are new fans under the age of 18 who have not watched us in the past. I would say theres approximately 2-3 k of them every week in the SS. Get a bit of success and youd double the young fans figure overnight, and add 2k on the gate, plus the success would bring many fans (the fairweathers) back, including a couple of thousand gloryboys currently watching the pathetics!! Thats 18k straight away. I actually know a number of people who were wigan rl before but are now pathetically a shatics fan....along with a number who dont actually watch us at the moment or only keep a passing interest because we're doing nothing and are boring.

Tbh far from being at saturation point our current 14 k is actually near enough our CORE support at the moment, which has gone up from a core support of approximately only 7-8k when we moved to the JJB who would follow through thick and thin. Get a bit of success and our crowds could be mega.....Support wise wigan RL are actually stronger now than we ever have been, despite the pathetics presence in the Prima Donna League. The only issue is that our crowds will inevitably decline if we continue like the last 10 years....its a wonder our crowds havent already tbh.

Just because it hasnt been done before doesnt mean its 'cloud cuckoo land'......if everyone had your attitude we'd still be making fire with sticks and hunting our food!!


how do you think the telephone was invented?, the TV?

20k gates are achievable and are in our current chairman's business plan (if he can shift the current coach and bring in a bit of class)

The only team who getting those gates is cloud cuckoo land is wire as their little 5h1tty ground is not big enough

The salary cap is like putting weights on Usain Bolts feet.

I have justified my viewpoint far more than those that are saying it is easy to have an average attendance of 20,000 pal. The fact that no other club has done it before, or even really come close, is one strong argument that it is not easy to do so. We can all pluck figures out of thin air and I would love all clubs to average 20,000 but I can be realistic as well. For every 15,000 crowd against Harlequins, Catalan, Salford et al (which you dont even get against these clubs anyway) you would have to get a sell out 25,000 one to compensate. Now correct me if I am wrong but Wigan have only ever done this against Saints at the JJB and even then there have been far more occasions when it hasnt been sold out then when it has.

Wigan is one of the few places where RL is the number one sport and yet they have never come close to averaging 20,000. It is a fairly average sized town and just about every one that could play and like RL already does. A vast majority of these already go to games and Wigan are not going to start getting thousands more to go to games. If anything with the rise of Wigan Athletic and more and more youngsters growing up as Latics fans instaed of United and Liverpool etc ones then things could even go the other way. Yes Wigan may get an extra few thousand with more success but that will still leave them a long way short of an average of 20,000. They couldnt even get this in the 80s and 90s, way before the time of the salary cap which Wigan fans are so fond of blaming.

As I said Leeds is the only club in SL at the moment that has a chnce of getting this. It is a big city with a big population. It even has 60,000+ students in Headingley to attract. There are also great swathes of the city that are not particularly into RL. They therefore have plenty of potential converts to RL and may have a chance. However Wigan do not.

I would be happy if we actually scored off a set move.

overblown

most young kids still 'follow' liverpool or united. also you're assuming latics will always be in top division. if they ever go down their crowds will drop well down.


considering wigan has a population of around 80k i'd say we're doing well.

I know this is for 2006 but this makes interesting reading

[urlhttp://jotbin.com/articles/2007/01/14/populationattendances[/url

yeah, seen that before mate. people seem to forget that wigan is a small place and has a premier league football club to compete with. not to mention the premier league clubs on our doorstep.

Did you even read the previous posts that were being discussed? I would agree that Wigan are doing well and I would say that them and Cas do the best in SL. However that isnt really the argument and what you say just backs up what I was saying.

so why are you having a go?

Have you been watching 'The Footy Show' ?

The Australians have regularly questioned the slowing down of the game over there. The slowing down at the ruck and the constant referral to the video referee.



Wigan have won more trophies than any other British RL Club even if you don't take into account the trophies won in that decade, to claim the honours are nothing special is preposterous.

That's professional sport when you get to the highest level.

There is room for flair, however it has to be done at the right time rather than all the time. Very few teams are able to play with flair and win things consistently.

Saints have done well not following your theory. Leeds also.

Stats last year showed these 2 teams as having made more mistakes than most other teams.