Quote: roofaldo2 "The trouble is, there's no money coming into RL. When a club reaches out and gets itself a decent paying sponsor as Bradford have this year with Provident, then out come the pitchforks and cries of immorality.
There's this belief that SL is some how the best watched sport on Sky after football, however I'm not sure that's still the case. It may have been 10 years ago, but it seems clear that we're not pulling in big viewing numbers as the lack of an recognised sponsor for the league suggests that companies don't feel that our product reaches anywhere near enough people to be worth investing in.
As it stands, Sky have 4 sports channels to fill with programming. SL isn't that expensive a sport to show and provides about 6 hours a week. But really, Sky have us over a barrel. If they turn round and say at the next negotiation "He's 75% of the last deal, take it or leave it." then SL would have to take it.'"
Weekly viewing figures published by BARB show that RL consistently gets higher viewing figures than RU. A few weeks ago for example, 228,000 watched Leeds v Warrington. 159,000 watched the European RU. I think around 35% of viewers are based down south with a fair few in Wales and Scotland too.
