Of course British RL needs annual promotion and relegation. This is not Australia. Super League is a minority sport, in danger of being perceived as a limited group of homogenised clubs owned by SKY and dominated by Australians. It simply isn't big enough to miss out on the opportunities to develop its profile, improve credibility, and heighten awareness which would be brought by the excitement of annual promotion and relegation.

There are difficulties to promotion and relegation, in the way franchising and expansion have difficulties, but if the will was there, it could be done well, and with noticeable benefit to the sport.

Unfortunately, there are teams who were in the right place at the right time, found themselves in an elite club, and have no intention of allowing a threat to their position merely for the sake of the sport in general. These are the real flatcappers, whose call is "It's fine as it is. Don't change it now."

Football would be awful without P&R !!! If the Premiership was franchised Leeds / Sheffield Wednesday / Newcastle would be back in the premiership, Hull and Wigan would probably be out!

And football fans accross the country would be going mental! The English Football league is one of the top 3 leagues in the world! NRL and Super League come nowhere near in comparison, so to say Promotion and relegation is unseccussful is utter cr@p!

Do you realize how many soccer teams in leagues all over the world go bust ever year because of P&R?

Look at Leeds UTD.

Look at the way top English clubs p*ss money away so badly that they need rich backers who don't mind losing millions upon millions of dollars just to keep going.

Do you realize how much debt top English clubs are in? How little it would take for them to fall over?



You show me one single soccer league anywhere in the world that competitive. Not one of two teams that are running awya with it and just buying titles. Show me one competition where half the teams could win in say a 5 year span.


There isnt one. Not a single one.

The P&R debate has been emotionally charged and polarised into two diametrically opposing positions, but there's little discussion of any other possible views. Either the franchise system, or annual P&R.

English RL has the potential to have a more effective system for promoting/relegating players AND clubs than Australian RL, because English sport has a tradition/culture/history of P&R.

Annual relegation inhibits top flight clubs from long term planning. That has been scrapped. However a staggered system of P&R tied into an RLWC cycle could give top flight clubs a set period of stability, yet give lower division clubs a set pathway into the elite. I'd propose a system that every 4 years, promotion of 3 teams based on meeting a range of on and off-field criteria, relegation of up to 3 teams if competition size remains constant.

And the criteria for both the promotion and the relegation is ?

So should we have 11 thugs on the pitch crowding the ref? That's what they do in association?
You know you're onto a loser when you point at wendyball as an example, it's a poor sport with too much money. It would make more sence to compare league with XV or ice hockey or basketball or some other non-majority sport.