No pre-season games here.

Starting this weekend:
Swinton
Bulls
Dewsbury
Toulouse
Fax
Fev
York
Rochdale
Barrow
Leigh

Plus playoffs

I'm a Wire fan but I'm in favour of the cap. Wigan did do a lot of damage to the game in the mid 80s-mid 90s when they bought any player who showed promise elsewhere whatever the cost. I was on record then and maintain now that only a solid level of competition across as many clubs as possible will sustain sucess for any team sport. I think the marquee rule has proven a useful 'safety valve' for the richer clubs to allow them, when they have the money as some like Wire do, to spend it but in a careful and controlled way. No club, no matter how rich, can simply keep acquiring all the talent at the expene of the game as a whole. I do agree, though, that the cap has to rise modestly each year if we are to hang onto talent.

And back then the profile of the game was massive. Now we are sandwiched between the 2nd division of women’s football and the tiddlywinks champions league.

And back then the world was very different.
The problem isn’t that RL went away from what it was doing well to start doing something wrong. It was always doing something wrong. It was spending far more money than it was bringing in and crucially was only spending it on short term benefit such as players. Clubs infrastructure was left to wither and die and is still the main reason as to why we’re in the position we’re in now.

The problem was the world changed. People stopped caring about how a small ex mining town fared. They wanted to see big clubs from places they could at least imagine they had an affinity to. Which is why Union massively increased its profile, not because of its domestic game, people generally don’t care who wins the Union Premiership, but because of its international game which you can immediately join a side and care about the result.
League was still too busy crowing over the fact we got over 10k to a relegation decider between 2 small towns.
Peoples time is too limited and their choice of how to spend that time too varied now to rely on drawing people in to most RL games at the moment. There’s something better or, crucially, easier to spend that time on.

I’m in favour of the cap, but like you say the cap to rise modestly each year. Problem we got into is that it didn’t raise from the £1.8m for a very long time. Like I said previously we should be touching £3m mark by now, now only just now creeping past £2m.

I disagree that we need to make sure it’s as even a competition throughout the league as possible. Only have to look at other sports to see how they’ve been successful when they’ve had teams/individuals dominate. RL fans seem to think the same people winning hurts the sport whereas other sports are built around their dominate teams/individuals such as Federer, Woods, Schumacher, Hamilton, Phil Taylor, Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry.....Man Utd in the Fergie era, Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan in the 90’s, the New York Yankees, Barcelona and Real Madrid, New England Patriots and Tom Brady, New Zealand in RU.

Other sports celebrate and build off the back of dominate successful teams/individuals...,,we feel the need to clip the wings of any teams who could threaten to do so and see it as a problem that the same teams keep winning the big prizes. Despite what fans of clubs who don’t ever win trophies say....the same teams winning isn’t what hurts our sport, it’s that we’ve been trying too hard to prevent it over the last decade.

When you boil the whole standing of RL in the overall sporting arena, it's "failure" has been against Union, a sport which for decades pretended that it was an amateur sport but now, is very much professional and if we are honest about the situation, there is rock all that League can do to genuinely compete with it, certainly not in the UK.
The jewel in the RU crown over here is the six nations and RL wont EVER have the profile of the other code.
There really should be a genuine conversation on where the sport is headed (sorry for the Americanism).

The argument about people having "something better" to do could be levelled at every sport and you could actually argue that RL scored an own goal by moving to the play off system and grand final, which has taken away all of the glamour and kudos of the sports once "protected" event.

The Challenge Cup and particularly the final, used to have massive kudos and was the one competition that received genuine national coverage, with the Wigan glory years probably being the peak of it's popularity.
However, the GF has now replaced the CC Final as the end of season celebration and of course, with Sky being the sports primary broadcasting partner, this situation is pretty much irreversible.

The one sure thing is that despite the tinkering and "innovation" with the sport, there really is no quick fix.

The World Club Challenge, particularly the extended version could gain some additional exposure but, having tried this for a whole 2 seasons and been thumped by the Aussie club sides, this has been shelved. Plus, there was no real appetite from our Aussie cousins.

However a "proper" series could help the sports profile but, this would have to be the top 3 from each hemisphere and not substituted clubs, which was embarrassing.

Ultimately, we suffer from having so few genuine RL playing nations and again, this isn't going to change in the foreseeable future.