Quote: dixie "The report on Sky sports says that Rugby league has lost over half a million pounds worth of funding earmarked for community projects designed to tempt new players and staff to the sport.'"
Yeah it's the Whole Sport Plan money that's been docked, the money for growing the game at community level, employing development officers, growing schools competitions and so on.
The RFL were awarded £17m in March 2013 for their Whole Sport Plan, this is the half-way stage of the 4-year process. RL was awarded £30m for 2009-20013, which was chopped in 2011 for poor performance at the half-way stage of that process. It was then reduced to £17m for 2013, and has now been docked again for underperformance against targets. There's a pattern here.
I'm very interested to see what Sport England propose to do; I expect it will be nothing and it's just carefully-worded press release language to avoid a backlash from fans, volunteers, coaches and so on of the sports in question. The obvious response being 'how can you grow a sport when the funding is continually pulled?'
Sport England will also only recognise one national governing body per sport as the lead administrative body, so they have no alternatives in the market to go to if the RFL aren't delivering. All they can do is penalise the one NGB for being rubbish, and give them less money to be even more rubbish.
