Quote Trebor1="Trebor1"Imo promotion and relegation in its current form should be scrapped. Its not worked. Needs a lot consultation to find the way forward but relegation has too many negatives.'"
I don’t think P&R is the reason for lower attendances. I think it has much more to do with the economy than P&R. I know I’ve cut back on the amount of away games I go to over recent years, mostly for costs reasons, partly for time. I’m sure other people are the same across the game.
There’s also the issue of how watchable the games are. I’ve always maintained that I don’t buy into this rose tinted nonsense that somehow the game was much higher quality 20 years ago, a simple look at how lackadaisical and soft defences were soon puts that argument to bed. However there’s no doubting it was better to watch in general.
So I think those 2 factors combined are a major issue for the sport and aren’t something easily fixed. Another issue however is the number of games and the number of times you play each opponent. It doesn’t make it special if you know you’re likely to play Wigan 3/4 times this season for instance. Especially when that’s year after year.
I think we need to cut the number of games which would then force clubs to market themselves and pack games out. It would also do us a world of good when it comes around to internationals and our players are knackered from being at clubs with much smaller squads and playing far more games than their Aussie/Kiwi counterparts.
Having said that I’d still scrap P&R. I think it’s massively destabilising to the sport as proved by how much the threat of it has set Leeds back by 5 years at a guess? Without the threat of P&R we could have been developing youngsters more and not making stop gap signings like Thompson, Donaldson, Evans etc
