Lenighan blames West Yorkshire mafia

Quote: Jamie101 "For me (coming from the north east originally and then living in Leeds 12 years) the issue is the size of the towns / clubs. I now live in Ponte and it isn't a huge town, yet has one SL team 2 miles from it one side, and one Championship team 2 miles from it on the other. Consequently a small town of 31,000 is split between two teams in the top two divisions. Cas has about 40,000 people and Fev has 15,000. Wakefield is 8 miles from my door. Wakefield is a town of 100k. So that is 3 clubs in the top 2 leagues within 10 miles of one another, with only 185k residents.

This would be fine if the next nearest SL / Champ clubs were 30,40,50 miles away, increasing your catchment area. But they aren't. Within about 20 miles there is Leeds (2.6m) , Batley (38k), Dewsbury (63k), Halifax (88k). That is about 3m people, across 7 clubs across 25 miles. Taking Leeds out - 6 clubs with 400k people between them. And because they are all so close, it goes more inward so people in Shettleston support Wakey, people in Fev will only support Fev, people on the Cas side of Ponte support Cas but wouldn't support Fev. Now presume 1 in 10 people in those towns actually regularly attend rugby league games (ie are your target audience) - you then have 6 teams (discounting Leeds) in competition for about 40k rugby fans to support and attend their team's games.

In contrast, I was raised in Durham (an in-between town for Newcastle and Sunderland - a la Ponte for Cas / Fev but on a bigger scale. Football wise, Durham is / was split between both those clubs largely. The thing was though, there are like 750k people in Newcastle, 175k in Sunderland and 50k in Durham so 1m people to split between 2 teams. If 10% of those people were to attend games, NUFC and SAFC would still be sharing 100k fans between the two of them.

It's saturation with RL. They should focus on bigger towns - either start new teams there or get near-ish teams play games there. Put Shef games on free after Shef Wed / Utd games when you have 25K people already there - put Salford games on after a Man Yoo FA Cup games when you have 70k there - put Sts on in Liverpool after a LC game when you have 50k there.

It's just saturation and everyone is making everyone else thirsty as there are too many trying to grow to close to each other.

Simi'"

In pure business analytics this kind of analysis works - sadly we are in the world of sport where the emotions attached to entertainment are very different almost tribal.

There is a reason why new clubs in any sport rarely work - because you need emotional attachment - that takes years. Just plonking a club in Sheffield would not work and hasn't worked - even in its brighter days they struggled to get 5k to a game.

They had a team in Gateshead - how long before it folded - 2 years - evidence suggests what Jamie is proposing simply will not work and I don't see what will change to make it work.

Rugby league is a sport followed by enthusiasts/families not by corporate/young men who are completely obsessed and will spend every penny to get a fix of soccer. If you are going to have a new club it has to be in an area where people understand its values and kids play it at school or there is an amateur structure to support it.

If we concentrate on 14 entities with 14 feeder clubs then you spread the population of the north of England across fewer entities so increase the chances of greater support. To make this sustainable you need 70k a week at the SL level and 3k a week at the feeder club games so approx. 90k a week across all 14 games played in a weekend. The population of the North of England is c15m - take 2m off for North East and other outlying areas that gives c13m of potential audience so RL needs to attract .7% to hit the 90k