The franchise model should have been the best approach. The problem was that the system was so badly set up because it measured the wrong things and encouraged the wrong behaviours. It encouraged clubs to give out unsustainably cheap tickets in order to meet the "average attendance" criteria for example, when the measurement should have been based around ticket revenue. That would have forced clubs to focus much more on how they market themselves to actually grow - free and cheap tickets isn't marketing.

That was what escalated Bradford's problems. The club devalued its product by selling it cheaply, it cut its profit margin to meet the attendance criteria and, when the bank pulled its credit line, it couldn't regain that profit margin.

There is no magic bullet to sort this out, too many teams in the North of England, Union in competition with league ( Union also struggling in the North of England ) 12 teams fighting over the pot of money given by SKY. The whole point of the three monkeys is to keep more of the money, so unless there is a huge cash injection from Sky at the next renewal then there will be no progress to 14 teams, hence the need for the loop games. Poor marketing at best and trying to make the game more appealing by including teams from France, surely they should have tried marketing the better off part of France as opposed to an area h little cash.
Looking at the Championship we have teams competing less than 5 miles from each other, even teams in the SL are too close together. Maybe it is time for a total rethink on how the game should be run. Start by cutting back the teams in the lower divisions, using them as feeder clubs. The SL clubs cannot afford to run a reserve team where will the money come from to pay the players, all it will do is dilute the Sky money even further, the standard will simply fall. You may as well play the reserves as we do now as duel registration etc. There are too many teams in such a small area across the north of England. People talk about promotion and relegation well since they introduced relegation and promotion the standards have not got any better, the only way the standards will improve is by getting more money into the sport and paying higher salaries to the top players. Paying the same to Salford, Wakefield and Widnes and others simply reduces the quality of the sport to the lowest of the low, The salary cap should be based on average attendance and not equally by each team. Teams with the highest support should be better rewarded and allowed to spend more money on players, simply capping everyone as the same will reduce the quality of the game.

I would wager your team has relatively good support.

At the very least, the salary cap should have increased in line with inflation. In real terms, the salary cap today is around £1m less than it was in 1999.

I have no issue with the concept of a salary cap - nobody wants to go back to the era where Wigan ed money that they didn't have buying up all of the talent, and where clubs like Leeds almost went into oblivion themselves by chasing after them - but we can't carry on giving the talent real-terms pay cuts for another two decades and we certainly shouldn't be in a position where clubs still can't afford to pay to a salary cap that was set nearly 20 years ago.

Would replacing the salary cap with a form of FFP work? Perhaps. If clubs want to spend more on players, it's up to them to come up with the growth to fund them. I seem to recall that the original salary cap had a "50% turnover or £1.9m, whichever was smaller" policy, before the 50% rule was scrapped.

The cap has been used to lower standards across the board. When Gallopp was CEO of the NRL in the mid 2000s he said that some SL teams were only paying 30-40% of the cap, compared to the NRL where most teams were at the limit. So by freezing it the bigger clubs have saved some money whilst others have probably gradually crept towards it.

As for the current system, it may have looked like a good idea, but it just hasn't worked.

Super 8s don't create any more meaningful games than just a straight playoff system - in the four years since it started only one team has made the top 4 from outside, and that was when Salford imploded from 4th.

The Middle s8s do create interest but put four SL teams in danger and forces them to take short term measures to try to stay up. Whilst it hasn't happened, it would have been possible for Widnes to finish bottom, sign a few stars for a couple of weeks and stay up at the expense of the 9th placed team. That clearly is not what was intended.

I have more sympathy as well with clubs complaining about the inability to plan and market games well in advance, and the crowds (for SL sides at least) are awful in both S8s and Middle 8s because those games can't be sold properly as part of the season ticket packages.

All in all it was an interesting experiment but ultimately a dud. Whilst I prefer franchising, 1-up 1-down will at least promote stability for more clubs in SL, and probably thr Championship as well.

Brodie is quite correct, there is no magic bullet to fix this problem. The product ie -the game is poor and stale the majority of players are lacking in talent. Most coaches are obsessed with statistics, very little ingenuity is on view. The super league is supposed to be highly professional. Yet to a large section of players the wages are quite poor. The salary cap needs to be uplifted to attract better quality players. If not the game will continue as it is going nowhere with sky propping the game up.

do we know which teams voted for and against last Friday ?

It was a secret ballot. Other than a couple of clubs that made their positions public, the individual votes aren't revealed.

Yep I’d go with the % of turnover figure for establishing the salary cap. But I’d exclude both Sky TV money and loans from the revenue figure. So clubs can’t rely on directors loans and essentially money they haven’t earned to help them. I’d also put the figure closer to 30% than 50% as I think nowhere near enough is spent on club inrastructure. So if someone like Koukash wants to come into a club and spend a lot on players he still can do, he’s just got to spend elsewhere as well instead of simply inflating player wages across the board for a few years and then sodding off.

I have been following League for 60 years and in my experience the game has always relied on imported talent to bring the crowds in, be it top international Union players especially from Wales, or top League players from down under.

However both these sources have dried up over recent years to such an extent that SL is very much the poor relation nowadays.

We have never produced enough home grown talent to replace these star signings and our own young players now lack the experience of playing alongside great players and learning from them. All this has produced a steady decline in the quality of the product to such an extent that all that is left is the physicality which on its own is just boring.

The time has come for some radical thinking to arrest this decline and maybe we should be seriously developing Nines RL in the UK which could bring back the crowds and sponsors and appeal to the TV audience.

Agreed - RU's style is becoming like RL but with significantly more money to back it up

Nines has the potential to be to RL what T20 is to cricket - an exciting concept that lets the flair players show off their skills and appeals to a brand new audience that isn't necessarily interested in the hard graft and the nuances of forward play that the purists enjoy. If I were Elstone, some kind of Nines event would be one of the first things I'd be looking at introducing. Create the event, hype it and sell it to whatever city is willing to bid for it.

But knowing RL, we'd host it on a Tuesday night in Leigh, pack the teams with academy players and then dismiss the idea as a failure.

I had in mind ditching the loop games and the Magic weekend and having a series of weekend knock out competitions at different venues in a separate NINES championship so that SL players could be available.

As you say this could like T20 in cricket and I believe it would catch on with the public, TV and sponsors for the overall good of the game.

It would be a great opportunity for youngster and could bring back the smaller faster backs with skills who would also play alongside the better SL players who would relish playing on TV in front of large crowds. In turn it could improve the standard of SL

Using 9s as a replacement for Loop fixtures is a good shout (although I'd keep MW). Host almost a second league, with rounds inserted at various points in the season, played at a football venue (say, six rounds, each team plays two games on Sat and two on Sun?). It would need a serious prize money incentive for the clubs to buy into it though.

Yes this is the sort of thing I had in mind and it would soon draw in the crowds and money from TV and sponsorship.

With SL dying before our eyes the game needs some out of the box thinking and I believe that in Nines we have a better product than the very successful 7s in Union. So some serious investment and promotion is required and like T20 in cricket it could go International as countries like PNG and Figi and dare I say England who could compete on equal terms with the Ossies.