No. IMO the RFL have known exactly what they were doing all along, and have contrived to totally sideline the administrator. Its actually pretty unprecedented that an administrator has been rendered so powerless?

Absolutely not. I was just stating my opinion. What I said in my post goes for any club, not just Bradford. I don't want to see any current Superleague club leave the competition. They should all go through the same process. Perhaps you should put your glasses on and read my post again!

I will try and find out at my club end of season dinner

I know all of the clubs you have mentioned did have massive losses, but the problems at Bradford where clearly a hell of a lot worse. I was just wondering why they wern't flagged up.

No they were not.

It looks like our operating loss in 2011 was c.£1m (which if Hood had been honest about earlier it might have saved us all a hell of a lot of heartache). That followed a loss of £0.3m in 2010, and break even and profits in previous years. At the time of the Licensing decisions, we were noit that far into 2011.

Now go compare that with the financial performance of some of our contemporaries.

Their losses were far worse.

The only difference is that we had to stand on our own feet, whereas those other clubs had a wealthy owner prepared to pay the bills. Why did the RFL not baulk at granting THEM Licences, given that in some cases the sudden demise of the owner would have led to the sudden demise of the club? Same reason: they can see the elephant in the room even if some others cannot. They know just how precarious the game is placed financially, and what would happen if one of the dominoes was to fall...

McManus [iis[/i someone who should be listened to. But not to directly take tips on how to run a self-sustaining RL club, Langtree Park notwithstanding. The increase in shareholders' funds at St Helens has arisen due to newly subscribed capital rather than through profits. His greatest success has been the Bulls' greatest failure - the ability to find another person or persons willing to stump up the millions of pounds required to prop up almost every Super League club.

Exactly my point, and the point that Gareth has missed. He's managed what the likes of Davy and Hughes, and Pearson and Wilkinson have not. Caddick managed it as well, in a different way.

I think that you have misunderstood the point that I was trying to get across.

Its not just about the loss and the size of the loss, its also about the ability to cover those losses and stay afloat. Other clubs, like Saints, who had a loss of £2.4 million in 2011, were able to cover them and continue running as normal. Unfortunately, your club wasn't. That is what I meant when I said that Bradford's problems were worse. There was clearly a bigger problem at Bradford; hence why they are now in administration and other clubs are not.

Or in simple terms, to be a succsesful SL club, you need a sugar daddy, it was the lack of a single large financial backer that made the Fax application ' speculative '

What has now become even clearer is that the sustainability of many clubs is not through trading/revenue streams, but assisted capital finance in various guises

I don't know how you can just dismiss the stadium so quickly. The whole point about the new stadium was to provide the club with a strong financial and operating platform to take the club forward, strengthen the commercial side of the business and therefore make the club a self-sustaining RL club. It is an important element.

The club has no bank debt whatsoever and McManus said recently: "we are already seeing a very substantial improvement in financial performance, and this will strengthen even more materially in 2013. We are also likely to see a further strengthening of our balance sheet in 2012 and beyond as the stadium's fit out costs are capitalised".

It's not about stumping up millions of pounds to 'prop up' a club, it's called investment. The results speak for themselves.

Yeah, yeah - look, if the cash from directors had been left in the top half of the Balance Sheet as loans rather than the bottom half of the Balance Sheet as share capital the company would be the most technically insolvent in the league.

Langtree Park is a great stadium and hopefully will turn the business around into profitable or break even in its own right but it would never have been built in a normal business environment as there were no retained profits to pay for it (quite the opposite) and there is no way it will pay itself back in a way that would ever be commercially acceptable.