We (family of four) have had season tickets for the last 8 years, but decided against it this time. Some of that is cost - we live 70 miles away so fuel costs and increased season ticket prices have made it too pricey at a time when we have to cut back.

But we might have overcome that except for the fact that for the last 4-5 years during the formative period of my kids interest in sport there's been very little success on the field and they've experienced too many occasions where they've come away upset and dispirited, as well as cold and wet. Last year topped all that off, the idea that 'their team' might be gone, meant it was easier to move on rather than keep putting up with the pain, and neither of them wanted to go again regularly - too many other more satisfying things to be involved in, including their own involvement in sport which now takes a lot of our weekends, is cheaper and personally, for them, far more enjoyable.

They also follow football, the NFL, NBA, etc, which all seem to have more appeal to them because of the global nature of those games, their profile and the fact that their peer group know the players and can identify with the game etc. RL isn't even played at school level where we live and we're in Lancs, so hardly out of the heartlands, yet for a lot of their peer group, as far as profile, the game might as well not exist.

They're still Bulls fans, probably always will be, we had a full house watching the Leeds match on TV and came over to Odsal for the Salford game, but at a cost of £80 for a family of four in the family stand plus £25 in petrol and a meal out at OK's, we might make one other match this year.

I think it's great that kids under 11 can get in free, but unless people know about that and unless you have the marketing of characters/players/success that first attracted us, it will always be difficult to get new people in, particularly families - the costs and competition for spare cash are just too great. I think 6500 is probably a base of support to build from, but the days of 14-15k are long gone and likely never to return. In part, some of the problem I'm sure comes from the nature of the relationship between the City and club, which has never seemed to meet its potential. With the new ownership, time and investment that might change, but I have worked in Bradford for a long time now, and yet have never got the sense of everyday connection/interest in the club I get when I'm working in Wigan for example, that sense that the club is woven in to the very fabric of the town's identity. We've all seen what a cup run can do and the chicken and egg of success and increased support might be helped if we did the impossible in the CC or something similar in the playoffs, but I suspect for the medium term 7-8k will be about what we can expect with larger numbers for the derby, Wigan etc.

With regards to kids and social media and the future of the sport etc that Adey raised I do worry about the future of RL. In a world of instant access to sports with a global profile, it's likely that those sports will continue to prosper and regional games will be diminished as a result - the fact that the NFL can sell out Wembley for two games, whilst the CC final will struggle to get a full house is alarming, great for American football, but again only so much money to go around.

I also don't think it helps that Sky has shown so little interest in Aussie RL, yet they have have 'super rugby' in abundance - if you were a casual spectator interested in 'rugby' as a game, you'd struggle to pick out RL as a real alternative to RU. You can have all the magazine programmes, special interest stuff there is, but without actually showing more games from elsewhere around the world, any casual sports fan would be forgiven for thinking it was a minority interest variant of the 'real game'. Of course it also doesn't help when some of the matches that Sky do cover are so one-sided - Wigan v Widnes for example, and look at some of the matches they could have ended up with last weekend - god forbid they ever cover a match the likes of Wigan -v Hull KR. Similarly I've hardly met anyone outside of the RL community who knows the World Cup is taking place, even casual sky viewers I know, who do have an interest, have not been aware of it.

I hope this changes, and I hope the World Cup is a success, but at present the future of RL doesn't look so bright and I think Bradford's attendances reflect some of that and some of the problems that have been systemic to the club over the last few years. With time and energy and a lot of work that might turn around, but the context of the sport in which the club is operating is also problematic and needs to be understood.

It was that way up to '73. Sometimes it was one conference, sometimes it was regional. I think the move to the divisional system was so that there'd be a one home / one away fixture system.

Before my time too, '73 being the year I was born.

Didn't you get a few games in during your first few months?

I guess that depends on how Sky want to play it. The defining point about SL clubs to me is that they are full timers, so on that definition it would mean two divisions of full time pros under the SL umbrella.

To be honest, I'd have very serious doubts that Sky would want to underwrite it, and right now you can't see who else could and without that backing I can't see the RFL, or the bods running SL, going down that particular route.

And before. My parents were at the '73 cup final against Fev' a month or so before I was born.