I refuse to believe the Bulls situation has changed your colleagues' views of RL one iota. Do they dislike football due to its obscene money, player behaviour, scandals? Do they dislike yawnion that continues to copy RL, has its own financial crises, P&R farces? Do they dislike horse racing as it is corrupt to the core? Do they dislike cricket due to the ongoing corruption & match fixing? No, they dislike RL because it is a predominantly northern, working class, sport & they are narrow minded bigots.

The problem with the above is that with the move to a fully professional upper tier came the rather large cheque from Sky which could be bringing in perhaps 40% of the SL revenue. I know some less active fans will stay at home and watch the games on the box - so won't go through the turnstiles, but still leaves a very large net contribution from Sky. You could argue that we have two sports: SL and the "purer" version of the game your refer to above. This is very similar to American Football - a top tier rolling in media money - and a the more traditional college games. No interest in the game myself but I work for a US company and know a lot of the guys over there swear by college football.

Didn't find it to be dying in Sydney.

The professional game with no P&R?

Premier League Soccer here is doing reasonably well - with teams from Stoke, Wigan, Sunderland, Norwich, Reading, Southampton, Birmingham suburbs etc. They've got three up, three down. UK RL only needs one-up, one-down to sort things out. Or, tt, are you one of those guys that gets paid to sit in the smoke-filled rooms trying to plan everything?

if people are worried that a team that is promoted spends heavily and then get relegated and goes out of buisness then an easy solution is the promoted team is exempt from relegation until their 3rd season, this gives them time to put in place a youth structure and a decent playing squad and attract crowds with better results. If they finish bottom in year 1 and 2 the next lowest team that is not exempt gets relegated. Stops the yoyo effect of teams being promoted only to go straight back down

They are huge conurbations &/or sugar daddies keep them afloat. There are probably a 100 times more kids to choose from for talent & seemingly no end of billionaires from dictatorships ready to fund the next promoted club. They don't have automatic promotion in some other leading sports. We've tried it before, it didn't work.



Simples. Why did no-one else think of it?



Quite handsomely, but smoking has been banned in work places for a while if you were not aware. Not that I see the relevance.

I was thinking this myself. Seemed to work for Catalans when they first joined SL

The last time Great Britain was good enough to give the Aussies a real good hammering (Melbourne 1992; ' I was there') was at a time automatic promotion and relegation between the leagues was operating very successfully.

We also had P&R in 2002 when we were thoroughly hammered down under and we still had P&R the following year when we were whitewashed by an under strength Aussie team in the ashes. There doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between P&R and success against the Aussies

There is NO correlation between P&R and a successful international side. Look at the NRL, there's no P&R there yet the Aussies consistently dominate the international scene.

There's so many things that DO have a correlation mind, there's the fact that in Australia RL is a major sport on a par with football in this country and hence attracts a hell of a lot more interest, both from the public and from sponsorship, than our little northern game does over here.

As it is one of the major sports down under, it also attracts the best athletes, again something that in this country RL is not able to do as the best young lads tend to gravitate towards football and really only those from certain schools/areas where RL is deeply engrained have any real interest in pursuing a career as a pro RL player.