Quote: Call Me God "And there was me thinking that Cricket was the national sport of Australia and Australian Rules was the biggest footie code......34,818 was the average attendance at the AFL in 2018, some 19,558 more fans per game than the NRL, with AFL side the Sydney Swans being the best supported team in NSW a state that delivers 12 of the 16 NRL sides and is supposedly a RL state?'"
Yet the NRL has the biggest TV audience. I don't underestimate the popularity of aerial ping pong in Australia and acknowledge its wider spread but in NSW and Queensland the NRL is king and players face a much higher level of scrutiny, more at a level football players get here.
One other important point about the original article cited, the "prominent columnist" is an unapologetic Yawnion troll who will never miss an opportunity to have a dig at a code that is far more popular and successful than the dying game he favours. There have been more than enough incidents of yawnion players misbehaving on the grog but these receive less attention because, the (a) their chums in the press are better at cover ups and (b) nobody gives a rat's cock about them.
NRL bad boy incidents compared to SL are more numerous than SL simply because of the greater number of players there and the interest in them. If we were going on percentages of bad apples in the sport it is probably higher in SL, in addition to our home grown idiots we import those deemed too badly behaved for the NRL.
HOW MANY TIMES?????
£20 a ticket and £15 on beer and merchandise.....so an away fan is worth £35. At best, 1,000 is the average away support split across 11 rounds and I am being really generous here, so Toronto, replacing say Wakefield will cost a SL club £35,000.
The minimum turnover of a SL club is £4,000,000 so Toronto instead of Widnes is worth less than 1% of a SL clubs turnover.
There are many valid reasons for and against expansion into America, but "AWAY FANS" isn't one of them. 
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