Cor blimey - where do you start with this one.

Ok, first point. 'Fixing' SL does not fix RL as a whole. The two have very different problems. Yes some are interconnected, but many arent.

So ignoring the Championship and internationals I would say that SL needs to be reduced by at least two teams to make it a more competitive league. The problem with that is that you reduce income which could force clubs into administration. Then SL goes from 14 to 12 to 7/8 clubs. This then leads the remaining clubs into adminsitration because the competition becomes pointless, sponsors walk and only die hard fans turn up. This is of course extreme but very plausible.

So forget looking at SL in isolation, that is only one piece of the jigsaw.

For me the answer is to expand the competition. Im not interested in players moaning about the number of games. If they dont like it they can go. Bring back promotion and relegation (two up and two down each year foor me off a base of 16 teams). Nobody is stopped coming up because their ground is naff, how else are these clubs meant to earn the money to improve the ground?

Increase the salary cap max though make it a % of turnover. Get rid of the 20/20 rule. The size of a clubs squad should be dictated by their income not the RFL.

Bring back senior tours. If the kids can go to Oz and do a tour so can the 1st teamers. This will allow more of our players to play the Aussies so increase skills as well as increasing interest in the tours.

We need to sort out this Yorkshire V. Lancashire thing too. Either we do it properly and give it ten years worth of backing or lets not bother. This in-out stuff is pointless.

I've been looking and keeping a log on attendances.

What do you want to know?

Of course, figures alone mean nothing without analysis.

I can tell you that Leeds attendances have been on the decline for a while. 2007 was the highest attendance average watermark.

2007 - Total = 228,259 - Avg = 17,558
2008 - Total = 221,555 - Avg = 17,043
2009 - Total = 205,058 - Avg = 15,774
2010 - Total = 199,619 - Avg = 15,355
2011 - Total = 196,192 - Avg = 15,092
2012 - Total = 165,913 - Avg = 15,083 (2 home games left, Widnes & Salford)

The RFL’s insistence on improved stadia isn’t simply down to a love of fresh steel. There is a clear correlation with a lack of quality facilities and low crowds. Clubs simply cannot function on 3-6k in SL. The SC is an example of this, We have an SC which hasn’t risen for 10 years, which in real terms equates to a huge drop in wages for our players, we lose players to RU, the NRL and the players we compete to bring back the other way aren’t top quality.

The biggest name in world rugby was available this year, a guaranteed crowd pleaser, a stadium filler, not one SL club can get close to even putting a worthwhile bid in, we have let ourselves get that far behind that French RU, the NRL, NZRU, and the Japanese RU are all in a better position to put together a package for SBW than anybody in SL can.

We, as a game, simply cannot afford to carry on holding back the top of the game, so that a minority of clubs in the middle can compete. Next year the NRL SC is going to shoot up, a lot more of our players will go over there, the game cannot sell itself to fans, sponsors or TV companies as a 2nd level competition, where the best players leave and are replaced by players not good enough for elsewhere

I accept we don’t have 13 (les Catalans are different) clubs capable of being SL clubs at the moment, but what we should be doing is working on getting 13 SL level clubs in this country, then we can look at bringing in more, there is no point worrying about why Fax, Leigh, Fev et al aren’t capable of being SL clubs, when some of the clubs we have in SL aren’t capable of being SL clubs a return to P+R would just make it much harder to have an SL full of SL quality clubs.

We should stick with franchising, stick with 14 clubs,
Bring the SC down from £1.7m to £1.2m but give clubs dispensation for 5 ‘marquee’ players whose wages aren’t on the cap.
We re-jig the Sky payments so half of it is given as a sale of TV rights, and half as a payment for producing and releasing home nations international players.
We should move to having a mid season international tournament between the home nations and the French, and play as home nations in the world cup, but play tri-nations and tours as GB.
We should centralise some things clubs are doing independently, things like club website holders, centralised ticketing, why on earth isn’t there an RFL website which sells all clubs merchandise?
Why don’t we have a heritage weekend? Selling heritage shirts, get some of the old boys walking around the pitch?
Wigans ‘big one’ has worked very well, why isn’t every club doing it? Why aren’t the RFL forcing them to? The RFL should designate one club a home game, where they are given £50k to market it, and another £25k as a bonus if they can sell it out.


There are plenty of ways the RFL can look at improving the game, and increase attendance, visibility, and the amount of money coming in to the game, but it will take time, effort and focus to do so. Promotion and Relegation would only mean that every year, we lost the effort put into one club and start all over again with a different one. Shrinking the size of the league would only mean that we lost 2 teams to work with.

Nobody should be relegated from SL, it should be expanded as and when clubs are ready to move up.

I think it's a case of sticking with 14 teams for now, are some of the 14 good enough at the moment? No, but what would be better for them in the long run, staying in SL or dropping down to this new SL2 league idea. People who are fans of this insist this SL2 would be a great, competitive, thriving competition and whilst it would be good for the likes of the Championship clubs who are entered any teams dropping down from SL to accommodate this would suffer immensely perhaps almost fatally. People seem to forget the current economic climate too and that sport for most is a luxury not a necessity and whilst the UK's economy is struggling it is unfortunately for RL clubs a case of just trying to get by and not risk. Do we cut the cord on the teams struggling in SL or keep hanging onto them until they can hopefully get up to the level of others, people constantly complain we've cut the cord of the Championship teams in the past yet want us to do it to more teams.

As for the suggestion of dropping the CC, how would players missing out on the chance to play in front of 70,000-80,000 at Wembley and CC semi's like the one Leeds just won help this idea that we don't play enough intense games to beat the Aussies? I don't know why people think a reduction of teams would in any way help us beat them, did we not have 12 teams for quite a while in SL, was they any difference in results?

We lose to Australia because it's a much bigger sport over there, just like if England played the Aussies at football England would come out on top 9 times out of 10. Why is RL not as big as football over here, well largely to do with not enough kids playing it. Every kid will have played a game of football in his life and it's straight forward as a sport comes to understand and because people on here have watched RL for so long may forget that RL is trickier to grasp, i have friends that i've taken to several games over the years and/or watched on tv and i still find myself having to explain some of the more straight forward stuff. In most people i don't think you can truely appreciate and/or understand a sport until you've played it too and again it's getting people and especially kids to play it, but in this time when many parents want to wrap their kids in cotton wool the thought of them playing what we often refer to as 'toughest sport' won't go down well.

By my reckoning...
SL attendances to date overall are currently up 7.82% overall on last year.
Total SL attendances 2012 Average attendances have increased at...
Widnes over Crusaders by 82.24%
St Helens 78.71% or 69,432
Wakefield 23.85%
Salford 15.79%
Huddersfield 15.66%
Catalan 15.11%
Warrington 2.78%
Wigan 0.80%

Average attendances have decreased at...
Bradford -14.07%
Hull KR -8.54%
London -6.53%
Castleford -6.16%
Hull -5.40%
Leeds -1.38%

Note: St Helens huge 78.71% increase in attendances is obviously due to the new stadium, plus the fact they were playing home games at Widnes last year. Their attendances this year are 30.17% up on 2010 when they were at Knowsley Road.

Wakefield deserve a special mention here for their increased attendances without the aid of any new stadium. If the RFL and their fellow franchise fairies like Smokey TA had their way, they'd have been punted in favour of that pitiful Crusaders franchise experiment!

Huddersfield's increase this year may be down to all those cheapo £50 season tickets they flogged.

We live in hope!

Conversely you could look at what Wakefield have achieved under franchising as opposed to where they were in P+R , im glad they are no longer playing in front of 4k with a team full of aussie rejects, as they were when the backward flatcappers were clinging to their P+R experiment And yes I would have stuck by Celtic, I think giving up so easily was pretty stupid, but I have long said, even prior to Wakefields admin, that there is room for a club which unites the Wakefield district and can actually challenge, maybe finally someone has grabbed the bull by the horns and moved towards that, (in fact I predicted that if such a thing were to happen then it would be a ‘wakefield’ team and that Cas would conversely struggle)

I am heartened by the measure of reasoned and articulate responses to the OP and also please poster recognise the dangers of reducing the number of teams and that it doesn't equal a quick fix.

Someone has mention this but I think we should re-introduce tours. It'll be hard to sell it to the insular Aussies but I think short tours both ways would be tremendous for the game.

Over here, 3 tests, 3 consecutive Saturday afternoons with the BBC having initial rights and Sky secondary rights. A club match the weekend before the test and three midweek club matches. No suspension of SL fixtures BUT players removed from their Super League clubs for GB duty (yes, I use GB deliberately) for the three weeks. Similarly, when we tour over there clubs lose their players for the 5 week duration (inc travel).

The benefits would be that
- More players would be exposed to test rugby
- More players given 1st team opportunities when internationals on duty
- Equalising the comp as better teams lose more players to international duty
- Exposure of our international game on terrestrial TV
- Swell the league coffers with, hopefully, large attendances like those of the 1990s

It's basically the RFU model from the 6 nations and it works.

I agree that attendance-wise overall it's a break-even situation. An extra 348 if you exclude Saints, Widnes & Salford for the reasons you highlighted above. As I stated earlier, Huddersfield allocated 2000 season tickets at £50 each in one of the stands behind the sticks which may explain their increased attendances.

I've seen as many claim that SL attendances are on the increase as those claiming they are on the decline. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle

Perhaps we can thank all those Stobart lorries for maintaining the attendance levels, eh?

Why would we exclude those?

Going further, good quality stadia are a part of the match day experience. As the alternatives to attending games improve (i.e. for TV coverage, going HD, adding better analysis etc) then the in-person match day experience must increase in quality too. It's worth noting that even an organisation like the NFL realises they have to keep on top of this with league requirements such as wi-fi in all stadia being mandated.

The issues would come from the owners/coaches if they had to definately be without several first teamers for up to 3-5 SL games. As well as the risk results-wise with missing your best players, any SL game played on the same weekend as a GB-AUS Test Match with up to possibly 6-7 first-teamers missing would most likely see a decent dip in attendence and therefore income for the club.

I accept club chairmen would moan. But most club chairmen are small time idiots holding the game back or dragging it down.

Peter Hood was a club chairman. Should we invest the future of our sport to someone like him?

Do the RFU club chairmen complain about losing their international players for the six nations? or do they realise that the 6 nations is really what makes the whole sport and, therefore their club, blossom.

How depressing that the best comment on this thread is about RU. Spot on though G1.

Club RU has nothing on club RL but they do internationals so much better which gives them better exposure (not just TV but the written press) which leads to bigger sponsors which ends up bringing more money into the game.

For too long we have focused on SL, and yes its great. But many non RL fans simply dont care. RU do the opposite and it works. Dont ask me why, but it does.

Bring back tours!