York's position at 15th and everyone tipping them to be promoted shows you how flawed it is.

They've never won the Championship or competed at the top level, have relatively small crowds and, key for me, no academy.

We've got a well established academy that have produced many superleague and NRL level players including international reps. 2 of the current England team came through it, have a well established community foundation, have played at the highest level, have better oengagement and more fans. However, our ground has a bigger capacity and doesn't have video screen advertising hoardings so are rated lower than York.

No club without an academy should be given a grade B rating if the sport are serious about competing with others on offer to the general public.

I suspect that next season we will hit the 12 A graded clubs in SL mark making it pretty much impossible for any Championship team to get in there. I challenge anyone to go through the grading criteria and come up with a realistic way in which a Championship team can get to 15 points. It is pretty much impossible.

You only have to look at the score that London got this season to see the advantages of holding a place in SL so in my opinion the best thing for Championship clubs is to ride it out and in the RL tradition, IMG maybe gone in 3 or 4 years and we are on to something else. The big question for teams like Bradford is if the money men will stick around and wait that long as we also know there is zero chance that the clubs vote to extend SL to 14 teams so that is not an option.

It all comes down to IMG fulfilling their core job - increasing revenue. And the tv contract is the lever for 14 clubs.

Agreed, if they say we’ve got interest in 7matches per weekend and have a 25% uplift in the contract but because it’s to be shared 14 ways you’ll only see an overall 10% uplift, then it’s possible. But it’s all on IMG exploring the financials with bidders for 7 vs 6 games per weekend.

Think York have the potential to be in SL. Fantastic stadium and reasonable fan base. Would they even be able to go FT though?

They've still a lot of work to do. They're one of the darlings of the RL media so these things don't get scrutinised, hence we've seen journos tweeting how amazing Applegarth (who I really like, but some perspective please!) while Nobles "Comedy value" apparently . We'll see next year.

Think York may have been of the clever clubs with their accounts. A million pounds suddenly appeared in their Asset creditors and also their liability creditors. So not sure whats going on there!

Their owner is a character too.

Yeah York seem to be mentioned quite a bit but they will also struggle to get to 15 points for the automatic spot so everyone has to hope that Salford, Hudds, or Hull completley mess up. I guess there is a chance but I would guess that with the experience of this year and what other teams have done, their points are more likely to go up rather than down. Added to that those 3 could simply choose to spend their funding on improvements off the field it really gives them a ridiculously weighted advantage.

So the Jason Hirst interview said we’re adding another point this month with primacy of the lease and building a directors box in the black seats on the halfway line. Performance we can aim for 0.35 through the 1885 cup and the championship final, and the 9th place from 3 years ago will fall away. I still don’t think that would be enough.

How many points do you get for the LED screen?

0.1?
It’s not much iirc

Will give us more chance than york, in reality what can the additionally do on top of what tgey have already done, cant really do additional work in the stands etc and are nowhere near filling the stadium

Big screen gets you neauwt unless the pixel concentration is high enough, Bullseye. LSV's (despite being adequate for UEFA matches to be staged there) was deemed to fail to meet the necessary IMG criteria and Leigh got nil this time for it.

Does IMG have a sideline in peddling acceptable screens?

Crooked as Trump!!