I agree the salary cap is important and should be enforced for this reason.

However, in the last couple of years with a salary cap in place Widnes (2007), Doncaster (2009), Rochdale (2009) have all gone into administration. The game in the UK is never going to have the financial clout that it does in Oz due to it being at least 5th or 6th in popularity over here. Quite a few fans from down under come on here regularly to tell us how well the sport is doing down there and how prom/reg doesn't work and thats fair enough. Good on them. But it's hardly a fair comparison is it?

As a Widnes fan I want to see promotion and relegation but without clubs pushing themselves to the brink of bankruptcy as we did to achieve it. Yes we have to expand the game to new areas but it's hard to do that when the heartlands themselves are struggling to compete with other sports. In Oz it's easier to expand your profile when you are number one in the market. We hear how clubs should merge for the greater good but that's easy to say when it's not your club that's in the firing line.

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.