Well we've been paying SL ticket prices for the last two seasons so your argument doesn't really stack up does it?

I've read on here that even in the early 00s when drawing 15,000 averages you were still losing money , certainly isn't viable outside SL

Spending money we haven't got has been our down fall and not paying the HMRC

4,000 people paying Super League prices doesn't compare with 15,000 people paying bob all. If we'd had been managed properly 15-20 years ago then we may have never got in this mess.

15,000 fans probably paying the same as the equivalent of 7,000 Leeds or Wigan fans.

Remember the days when you could buy a T&A and get in for £5?

I also think that's set a rod for our own backs. When we could get in so cheaply for years when we were dominating, it creates quite a psychological block to paying £20 to watch us play Featherstone.

So youve answered your own question , buying a fan base doesn't work

I still don't understand why Odsal isn't viable?

It's like buses, you wait from 2011 until 2017 and then "KAPOW" seven posts (out of thirteen since 2009) come along all at once. Have you bought the account from someone?

Quite apart from Odsal being just about the coldest place in Christendom and a bit crumbly, there are too many outside interested parties. Administrator is not professionally bothered by that. Green wants his pennies back. Odsal therefore white elephant - and with the ban in the ivory trade not worth ought bar all the very many above mentioned, non-sporting uses.

Bought the account off someone?! Don't be ridiculous! I don't post because I don't feel like I have to. I occasionally check in to see what's going on. Not that it has anything to do with anyone.

I had a genuine question I wasn't seeing answered, so thought I'd ask it.

The costs of simply keeping the place up to H&S standards and opening on matchdays etc. mean that it's costing us an arm and a leg to play there.

Of course, we were given a decent wedge of cash from the council to cover these costs, but we spent it on bullmania and our star studded squads of the early 2000s instead. Ah well.

The rent is £70k , which is commercially accurate. But the maintenance is astronomical and worsening year by year, along with the increased matchday overheads compared to other grounds.

The rent is one peppercorn. Well, that is what we used to pay the council, and what the RFL currently pay the Council.

Our rent to RFL would be a matter of whatever was negotiated when we took a sub-lease. If the maintenance, which was obviously a very well known figure, was so crippling, then why would anyone have even considered signing up n a 70K lease AND agreeing to pay the crippling costs of maintenance as well? It doesn't make any sense to me.

This is Peter Hood we're talking about. Common sense wasn't his forte, considering how he thought it was a good idea to sell the lease despite it being used as security on the bank overdraft.
He probably saw it as a short sighted solution to cashflow problems.

You could suggest that, and maybe he's not businessman of the year, but the very basic arithmetic of a modest cash sum in return for inflicting on yourself a hefty lease and an even heftier anual open-ended expenditure does not add up. So I don't buy that that's a fair picture. Nobody would be THAT stupid or financially incompetent and it isn't as if it would just be him, his accountants etc would also have been involved.

I'll concede that none of them seemingly twigging that the bank would not be best pleased at suddeny losing its security doesn't mark them out as financial whizzes, true. But still.