One thing that concerns me.

How if we assume cat B clubs in the top league will be about 6-8 clubs would those clubs be able to offer contracts to players longer than 12 months…. When one or even more could be at risk of being dropped from the league regardless of where they finish?

Players will naturally want to migrate to Cat A clubs as they 100% know that their contract is secure.

How can the category B clubs plan long term when their potentially on the chopping block every season regardless of finishing positions.

Scenario… wakey sign Murphy/Hall/Whitbread on 3/4 year deals.wakey finish 8th next season. Wakefield get graded category B and get placed in the second league.

How do the players contracts get handled? Do they simply get terminated? That’s a bit of a stormy situation.

There must be some serious detail and consideration behind these proposals surely. It puts pressure on clubs to improve which I have no issue with but at the same time it won’t be a level playing field when chasing players and signatures even more so than now.

Maybe I’m overthinking it.

Isn’t that the same every year? Players will want to go to the top clubs….if they don’t get that opportunity they sign for the lesser clubs and face the prospect of relegation and void contracts.

Not a surprise to see London hyped as very important, (again) - so best of luck with that one!

I suppose it is to a degree. Presently the only rosk is in performance and finishing bottom. That can happen now for more than one club no matter where they finish. Would be strange to see a team finish 7th and get relegated for example lol.

AT LAST !!! someone has come along and seen what this is all about. I have previously described this report as a first year under graduate project and a bad one at that. I am with you, if I had paid for this or even got this for free and someone had put this pathetic rubbish on my desk I would have booted them out of the building. This report is so bad and and so amateurish , I am amazed at the amount of people that are even discussing its merits, it has no credibibily whatsoever. The sheer fact that our so called sport is giving these IMG clowns any type of credence shows the level RL has sunk.

Just imagine if there were 3 "A" rated clubs in the bottom 3 and you were relegated from 9th ?

It's a strange system that puts on field performance so low down the priority list.

I may be wrong but after a season all the the grade B rated club would be accessed against all the B rating clubs in Division One. They will then replace any from SL that are found to have a lower rating with those in Division One. This could be any number of B classed clubs but similarly if they don’t trace any then no team is relegated. The survival therefore depends entirely of staying ahead of at least one grade B club in SL or all the rest in the lower divisions.
The problem is that for grade B clubs they have to go through this review at the end of each season.

I think you are living in dream kand if you think there will be a problem with so many As and Bs.
The problem has always been that we don't have enough.

That depends how transparent they are with the criteria and decisions. Apparently the gradings are being chosen jointly by IMG & the RFL and there will be no chance of appeal. It would be quite easy to manipulate it to suit an agenda. There could quite easily be 9 or 10 Grade A’s should they want them to be with their preferred Grade B options (say London) scoring higher than than others in that category.

Do any of you actually have the confidence in the RL to implement and run the system in a transparent and honest way, because surprise surprise I don't.
This will ultimately result in supporters being switched off and leaving the game.
I suspect the game will suffer from an effort to improve that falls well short.
Break away now and start negotiations with Channel 4 and Premier sports, let the 6 have it and see how they get on.

Break away from what and with whom?

So where was Channel 4 in the last negotiations or the ones before?

You live in a fantasy world if you believe there are any alternatives. Do you really think any broadcaster would pay 1.5 million per club per year for an un-sanctioned break away comp minus its most famous teams, just how popular do you think RL is? Bad news, it because it isn't, woman's football on the other hand.

Sorry but you need a serious reality check. Only SKY have ever shown an interest and even that's diminished. It's hardly a sellers market and RL in the northern hemisphere has very little to sell.

God knows. It's pub talk, just knee jerk stuff based on nothing tangible.

No thought as to legal challenges, costs of setting up a new comp, massive loss of earnings from not playing the big club - shows to me why accountants and businessmen run clubs these days and not the supporters, can you imagine the carnage.

What the RL should do is make a film showing RL in the early 80's, with many of its players out of shape, playing in front of tiny crowds, in victorian sheds in the freezing cold and remind people how the game has improved. Sure it could be way better and should be, but this throw the baby out with the bath water mentality is destroying the game.

People need to grow up and adapt to the new world. Like it or not we are never going back to the sixties era of Bovril, Woodbines and local heroes. It's a commercial world and it's a commercial game. We retain what we can but we must adapt to survive. People can slag McManus and Heathrington but all they have done wrong is be smarter than the rest.

It's a very human thing to want to drag people down to your level, but the smart thing to do is to drag yourself up to their level. That's what we are slowly doing.

It's certainly a positive aspiration to want to improve each and every club both on and off the field.
The serious issue here is that ANY range of criteria could be changed to suit an agenda.

There are comments in the IMG "report" about expanding the game and whilst it infers this would be in the UK, it does not specifically say so and it further suggests that "initially" overseas clubs will be capped at 2.

Are we going to be back to the Toronto scenario or, having consortiums wanting to buy clubs to move them to a "new" city etc.

Once you move away from on field performance deciding promotion and relegation, you are opening up a real can of worms and things can, and no doubt will be manipulated to engineer a particular outcome.

We could have a situation where a club is relegated from mid table to accommodate a lower league club with a certain number of plastic seats ?

There were many, many grey areas left in their "report" and the key omission was funding and just how we increase the broadcasting deal and lets face it, without a TV deal, the game is screwed

I'm not talking about the proposal such as they are. I was purely commentating on the idea of some kind of break away.

The only way to change the way RL is run is from the inside. This is not the FA or even Brexit, RL is a tiny sport with only a relatively low value, no sport could need a civil war less than we do.

It's now up to those who run the clubs to hammer out the best strategy possible within the limited room for manoeuvre that the sport has. We certainly can't afford to isolate SKY with talk of break aways, suicidal for the wider game and plays into the hands of the greedy elite.

For me; it’s the lack of detail that is most concerning. All IMG have done is create an environment of uncertainty & fear, which will undoubtedly turn nasty among fans - it’s already starting with club comparisons - I really hoped we’d left the off field stuff behind us, but here we go again.
Now you could argue that this is intentional; to force clubs like my own (Cas) to get their house in order - we already had a warning shot across the bough will the academy initially failing to get a licence, whether we’ve taken this in board remains to be seen.
What I would have loved to have read about is how IMG & the RFL are going to support category B clubs attain A status - something I communicated in the survey. Both Cas & Wakey have been so unlucky in ground development terms; literally everything that could go against us has - even now with your own development, the misfortune of outside influences (these absolute disaster capitalists in gov’t for one) is hampering you. Where’s the support from the RFL been? I’m talking historical here. Instead they regularly fined both our clubs for the state of our grounds, fan behaviour - tell me with a straight face you haven’t seen/heard fans from other clubs do the things we’ve been fined for - Now how the hell has any of that helped us improve our situation? The truth is it keeps us right where other certain clubs want us. They sport should be helping clubs up, not keeping them down & I fear it’s going to be more of the same from IMG after reading that statement. They’ll keep us around until the “expansion” clubs are ready - London, Toulouse, York & Newcastle are the first to spring to mind, with an outside chance for Bradford if they could get their act together, then we’re toast.

The problem with RL as I see it is that a lot of supporters think that RL outside SL is not worth watching and is a slow death for a club. Complete rubbish, of course, there's some excellent rugby played at lower level and in better grounds than ours was.
There should be more importance placed on the Championship and better support provided from the RL.
As for us, as has been said, the only way to break up the likes of Saint Helens and Leeds etc is to get smart and join them.
Quite frankly Saints, Wigan, Leeds and in the past Bradford have had much more than their share of glory because they have done things better than us, oh and of course they have money - blast I forgot that!

Good post steady .
How can anyone give credibility or trust a report that can have such a huge influence on our future that lacks so much detail. For instance, so much talk of cat A or cat B. The report mentions these catagories at length and also states how they will influence league status. Yet ! not a single word or explanation of their respective definitions. Here we all are saying this club will be Cat A because it has this,that or the other. This club will be CatB because it lacks this, that and the other. Truth is no one has a clue, everyone is guessing , so ask yourself why has the report failed to give the slightest detail about these rankings ? What are they hiding ?

PB there is loads of detail, just go back 15 years and read Framing the Future, it's almost identical just different buzz words

I certainly agree regarding breakaways, which would be even less helpful than the IMG proposal.
For me, it was the inference that off field issues will be more important than what takes place on the field of play.

They seem to have forgotten that RL is a sport and not some sort of corporate "ladder".

Many of us remember how Huddersfield were "saved" every season, primarily because of their stadium. Even their own fans thought that it was wrong, and we seem to be back in that mindset?

Ever since SL began the off-field v on-field debate has been at the core of the problem.

I'm actually not against off-field being the priority. However it has to be scrupulously fair and brilliantly implemented to actually work. In that regard SL has been an utter failure, and from what I see IMG are just time and motion men with a bunch of buzz words and will be no better, window dressers. God knows what this will be costing the game.

Vasty we all know about framing the future Just show me where in this report it states we will use the same criteria. Just show me one fact for definate that you will have to achieve to be Cat A. It could be something along those lines yes but still made to fit their own agenda. Yet it could be things never mentioned before.

As a matter of interest ,didnt framing the future state you must have a 10K capacity stadium, if so and you are suggesting thats what the will use ,thats us done. Truth is you dont know, and neither does hardly any one else.

Unfortunately, you can't have transparency of the process and also know all the derails at the first press conference.

IMG have put together a structure they feel the can run with to improve the game.
There has to be a vote of all clubs to ratify that. If a majority says yes then they can move forward.
If tge vote says no, any low level detail was wasted. Its just a stepped approach.

I would think they will add more detail as they go but they haven't start somewhere.
The alternative was to keep it all a secret until after the vote.
It would have created less noise but no one would have had chance to put their opinion forward.

I was joking!

Framing the future was full of vague nonsense and so is this - i did put a laughing emoji at the end

Chuffin emoji,s can hardly see them without my specs
Lets both get strapped in, because this new circus is only just starting, months of fun and laughs ahead I think.