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.

I think both business models are are full of potential problems to be honest, if that was your point. Both models have their own flaws and holes to fall into, but it was the bulls' model which fell into through trapdoor when one of the problem areas arose.

This though was our bad luck. It [icould[/i have been that one of the business empires, owned by a wealthy backer went pear shaped and the backer was consequently unable to service his club's debts - this is the real point, not the working losses, we and others, are making.

The clue is in the Avatar

I think you used the right word there, "if".

I believe £3 million is still in the top half of the balance sheetLangtree 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.'"

Hughes is an odd case - tonnes spent but not many would argue it is has been well-directed. With any sort of joined-up thinking on the marketing side we could have a thriving club down there.

I would be interested to know whether the SL clubs work together on one-size-fits-all ways in which to make their businesses more likely to break even. While some are geographical competitors, surely the bigger threat is football and/or apathy?

Soccer is a big competitor, but I'm not sure what you can do about it - or even if it's possible to do anything about it; it's the global sport around which all others revolve. We can't escape the coverage from TV and the press nor can we compete with the money that is thrown at the sport, so at best, we're in a position of trying to fit in alongside it. We tried moving to Sunday and then Summer but soccer is seven days a week and virtually 12 months a year, so there's no escape. We've tweaked the game to make it simpler and quicker and more exciting, all of which should make it more accessible to soccer followers, but we still struggle.

You missed out RU in the competitors list, btw. I know that with RU, unlike soccer, we're not aiming at the same demographic for supporters, but the higher financial level they achieve the easier it is for them to attract our players. If our stars go to them, we may as well shut up shop in terms of being a large national spectator sport

There is no logical reason that RL cannot increase attendances at all clubs , however no 2 clubs will have exactly the same way of doing it, its just a case of finding what you particular club needs to do, and doing it, however we are not talking ' quick fix ' , and that is the problem, the RFL and the clubs are inherently lazy , it comes from success and money, ie the people running our clubs and the sport are by definition ' financially successful ' and therefor have lost the understanding of what got them that success in the 1 st place

Well, no. Neither is there any logical reason why attendances won't decrease. Or why the won't go up at some clubs, and down at other clubs.


Well, there you go. Problem solved, you want to patent that.


Ah. Well, that must be the problem.


That seems so obvious when you point it out. Someone who is good at business completely loses the understanding of how to do it once they start running a RL club. Again, obvious, really. So, what we need is a bunch of business failures, to get the mirror effect, am I right?

You know, you really don't half spout some bollox.

A simple question? , are Chelsea a successful football club?