Phipps says that the reason that a unification game was tried in Australia is that RL crowds are down. In fact NRL crowds were the highest ever last year if you include both the regular season and the finals. See here.
rlhttp://stats.rleague.com/rl/crowds/summary.htmlrl
For RU neither super 15 nor club rugby publish regular attendance figures but the crowds in both competitions were certainly well down a year ago. Final figures are not yet available for either code for this year.

I thought back in the day that it was inevitable when the rahrahs chose the professional route we would end up with some sort of hybrid game. This was mainly due to the fact that union was such a boring spectacle that I didn't think they would attract enough spectators to make the game financially viable. However, their crowds are standing up fairly well but where there is a choice of watching either League or Union, as in our M62 corridor, then League wins hands down.

Personally I would like to see some sort of unification as I think our game has partly lost to its detriment the more technical aspects of the game such as contested scrums/play the balls, specialised hookers props etc and union is too reliant on gaining penalties rather than scoring trys.

No thanks. RL is the best product on any pitch, why would we want to make it inferior. There is more to sport than filling shiny stadiums and corporate boxes. I would rather watch local amatuer than some ised mix of union and league.

Union is abandonded as a sport and all the best players start playing League.

The slow little fat blokes with no necks and 6 foot 8 blokes all go back to not playing any sport at all.

Interesting read this! I would like to postulate something I consider to be the reason that the RU and the IRB would not be willing to merge back with RL in the immediate future and, again, it would be them that would reject a potential merger and not the other way around in principal.

The issue is about control and the people currently in charge in RU/IRB, at both some national levels and at an international level losing 'their' control of 'their' game.

Firstly, if they are really, really honest, they would have no choice but to change the rules and the game would look much more like League than Union because the game of RU would need to improve drastically, particularly at pro-club level throughout the world (maybe with exception of SA?). So, it would be the Union game that would change and quite frankly, the administrators (most of whom still go back before 1995!) of the game just don't want that to happen.

RU fear that the League clubs and the League Administrators would once again start to and ultimatley have the greater control and they would lose even more control of their game.

The clubs that would start to do well initially in newly merged Leagues, in England and Australia in particular, would be the old RL clubs. We would see the new merged national sides dominated by ex-League players, because the game would be more RL than RU, but RL club players are still generally fitter than RU players.

All this would resolves itself over time and produce a much stronger game but some very traditional and strong Union and League clubs who are not in bigger towns and city locations would not be in the new top flight and again, in England and Australia, more former League clubs would be in this top-flight and not the former RU clubs, just because of population demographics and amateur clubs (of both old codes) in these more populous areas.

What is interesting about this is that, as RU continues to grow geographically, then will they be forced to start and change the rules anyway? I think they will and in some ways I think this passion for expansion in RL is actually a waste of time, because in maybe another 20 years a reunited game looks very possible... but they will probably be playing a game that looks more like RL anyway!

It wont happen.

Despite RL crowds being down overall on previous years in the NRL there is still enough interest to sustain 2 different codes.

RL is as popular as it ever has been in the traditional areas in Superleague.

Rugby Union is still popular with those who like it.


There is no need for a hybrid code and it simply won't happen.